What Stays

An impression is made by applying pressure to the surface of things. It leaves a mark. Often, the mark is pronounced in the beginning and becomes fainter over time. Already, my experience at Ghost Ranch is competing with so many commitments and plans, the impression is spectral. Your smile, their insight, her untamed laughter, his bird-like movement across the floor, the stretches and curling in, reaching out and holding tight – all becoming phantoms dancing outside the windows of my Monday through Sunday life.

Still, there they are. I can invite the phantoms to take present shape again. I can bother to remember, bother to make an effort to hold precious the impressions even as life crowds in. I keep going, of course, but slip in deliberate pauses to re-call the faces, the images, the close moments, the distant waves.

Yes, it is easy to forget. It is habit to discount. Dropping the seeds from our pockets as we run wild-limbed toward the next. Of course, they will be carried by the wind and grow somewhere out of sight, but every once in a while, I like to sit in the garden of my attention and remember your beautiful eyes.