The other day, I woke up and my mind stayed behind.

All day long I struggled to make words with a tongue that felt like an ignorant fat worm and was just as uncooperative. I left rambling phone messages capped with brief apologies and hoped I would be out when the calls were returned.

The dumbness even affected my writing. Offering writing tips to an employee, I jotted “sentice.” I stared at it in horror! I knew that wasn’t the right word, certainly not the write spelling – AAHHH I did it again! Terrifying!

I broke for lunch at the deli down the street. On the two-block walk back to work, something remarkable happened. I saw a black iris. Really, it may have been purple but the single bloom was so amazingly dark and rich you could call it black and not be a liar.

My heart soared, it was so beautiful. And next to it was a green and white hosta, the most common of Midwest plants, but growing in a perfect patch of morning sun. Not too much sun, just enough to nurture this rosette of lush, perfectly symmetrical leaves. The leaves were chartreuse with a thick splash of white, more beautiful than any hosta I had ever seen.

I turned the corner and there was a clump of pampas grass, its leaves straight and geometric and next to them, a fern, an incredible textural pairing. And on the neighbor’s curb, a pile of trash so interesting that I stopped for a closer look – an old wooden chair with the back broken off, a child’s plastic rocking horse and a blue tub brimming with aluminum cans, every one a Mountain Dew, sparkling in the late afternoon sun.

And then I looked up, just in time to see a woman walking a dog. But not just any dog, not this day. No, a boxer, tall, handsome and lean, upholstered in velvety brown fur. And she was not just walking him but training– heel, sit, stay, heel, sit, stay – moving forward no more than a foot at a time, over and over as I stared.

All of it rushed into my consciousness, knocked down my limp brain and exposed me to the moment that simply existed, ready or not, bad hair day or top-of-the-world. The thing I had tried to accomplish in a forty-minute Zen sit the night before had simply come to me that day, the day I left my brain in bed, snug and happy between the sheets.

Mary Schanuel
(WWTW. May, 1995, Delavan, WI)