A lazy bookstore day ( with an iced latte, a pastry, my wife, an old friend, laptop, and a big picture window) is a truly fine thing. I sit looking southeast with the white powdery half-moon visible in the day-lit sky on a warm Fall late afternoon. It just hangs there, a still life image in such a photogenic pose, framed by a cornflower blue sky complements of the master photographer. The only hint of time’s passage is the high cumulus and lower masses of cumulonimbus scrim rolling South to North. A slow sunset curtain of light has reached the point of long oblique angles, and the red leaves of a nearby tree are aglow as if illuminated from inside by tiny hidden bulbs.
Cars move rhythmically in and out of the parking lot, in a flow that assumes a musical pattern. Everything is going somewhere, telling a grander story than the one told by any one of the players on this stage: a story shrouded in the sleepy ordinary of a nice October day.
Each object I see, the red tree, the cotton-whisp moon, the thickening clouds, the now carribean water-like blue sky, the impatient cars, and the intense sea gulls with full beaks, all move in different ways to their different places. If frozen in time, all that movement is a gathering pattern, a tapestry of meaningful intersections and overlays of tones, shapes, moods, and purposes.
Time for more of the bookstore’s nectar — the iced hazelnut latte.
Wonder what the picture is from outside the window looking in as I sit here typing, sipping, sitting at a table full of books with other people I don’t know moving all about in all directions, reading, studying, eating and just roaming about and flipping through pages of so many books?
I am a painting studying a painting!
© Brother Anthony Thomas and The Harried Mystic, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
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