Wanting

Wanting. Is how we stay in this life. Wanting. Is the life force. Wanting, not out of lack, but fed by desire, intention, possibility, hope, connection, love.

Sitting at our friends’s long wooden table scented with steaming stew, facing out to the dark Pacific beyond this room where seawater can have wild, white hair and curl in on itself, there is pure peace.

Two young raccoons are looking in at the bottom of the French doors. A fire in the wood stove warms my back. A shard of lettuce on my fork looks all the world like a smiling bear, though I say nothing, because J is telling a story, and we’re all laughing.

It is miraculous to be here. How many times has my husband ('T') almost died?

So rare for either of us to feel truly relaxed these days. You can’t wait for ‘things to get better,’ but allow the ease, the peace, the tiny joys to take hold of you anyway.

Our two, dear friends likely don’t see that T is gripped by a near-constant malaise, his body hurting just sitting in a chair, that he’s having a hard time following the conversation, or how the brief shower and getting dressed wore him down so thoroughly that he almost gave up on coming here tonight.

I watch my husband be happy anyway.

Standing beside him earlier in the bathroom, his breathing labored, body weakened, I asked if he still wanted go tonight.

“I want to. Yes, I want to. I want to go be with our friends.”

So, here we are. The sweet-faced raccoons peer up at me through the glass, and I point them out to T.

I watch him smile.

On the elaborate red dinner plate, butter melts and pools in his dollop of mash potatoes, which he loves. There’s music, a playlist of crooniers and jazz, mingling with J’s storytelling. Spices drift from the kitchen. Above us, in a bedroom, a calico dozes. This house is moving through the Milky Way at 140 miles per second, but feels still, rooted, a needed pause.

Relaxed. For a little while, we are all safe, there is nothing we need to tend to, no worries, no news.

Wanting to be in this moment is all that matters, even more than having it or how it unfolds. Wanting allows being. That is my mind speaking to itself.

Hello, raccoons, do you know this, too? It’s a silent question I send to the two black and white faces. What they no doubt want are a spoon of stew and a taste of potatoes. Ah, you’d rather have than want right now, yes?

Still, the wanting keeps them at door, believing in their petite, plum-ish, raccoon hearts that anything is possible.

They see us toasting the winter solstice, and I wonder what they perceive.

Drips of light will start lengthening the feel of each day. Who doesn’t want that?