human stuff in the "highest pitch of loveliness..."

"Life has a loveliness to sell, all beautiful and splendid things, blue waves whitening on a (lake), soaring fire that swings and sways...holding wonder like a cup."  Sara Teasdale

We arranged tea. I drive to a place that holds memories for the last time. My lovely ex is not there any more. His wife and I have tea periodically. Driving the half hour out to their beautiful home, I knew it was the end of an era. She is selling the house.

The afternoon is warm as the September breeze plays with my hair through the open window. The sun flashes its fabric off the car ahead, light is lacing leaves and wavelets on the cool, blue lake are wearing little "white mustaches".

Divorce leaves its fragments. Some visits at first were an adjustment -- family dynamics, my own dynamics. Those were the early days, things mattered. I was always well received yet life can get in the way of itself, as can I.  At times, I could hardly get in touch with the tangibility and exquisiteness of a simple caring. I knew in my head I cared yet my regular self, my ordinary self dragged along things I thought mattered -- not this loveliness of now I've stepped into or has it just stepped into me?

Coming up the drive, on a little hill sits their beautiful house with it's "for sale" sign. I look through the glass in the back door. She is at the kitchen table in a patch of light basking like a cat with its face to the sun, not noticing I had arrived. Knocking on the glass, she turns, smiles. The tea is steeped.

Somehow on the drive, I had taken a step back into a larger reality, into another self where all was poignant sentiment yet not sentimental. Surprisingly, I had stepped out of the human stuff and those times when things mattered into a caring, the impersonal-faceless kind and yet the personal kind. An awareness of things I had missed because things had mattered -- the situations, the circumstances, the appearances.

I drove away after tea thinking, if only I could have done it all in this "highest pitch of loveliness."* instead of, in things mattering. What had I missed? If I had only known there is a place where human fusses are saturated in light, do not matter in a reality larger then my smaller existence. So much does not matter, is not material, is not real. As Einstein, observed, "Concerning matter, we have all been wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter."

On my way home, I pass again the blue lake resting in the late afternoon stillness. The loveliness of this day, the velvet-caring have a perfection, a lightness of heart, spirit and a touch of melancholy. My last trip. I know in deepest knowing, "Oh, this is all that counts, ever counted or will ever count. Situations, circumstances, polarities do not exist, certainly do not matter, were not even substantive. The only thing alive is this dancing right now behind my rib cage -- light, essence, zing, sparkle and radiance. A place I want to be in when I make my transition, a change from particle to stardust. A place where it doesn't matter.

photo source: fotolia.com
* Alfred Sisley