what what is is

I'd just photographed these pine cones and that may have been the flutter of unease. I'd seen them bud, then grow till they were oozing resin as I passed through this park to the old house, the leisure centre or my Monday workplace. Now here they were at the point of devastation.

At the pond in the park were some swallows, glide giddy in their aerobatics. I was surprised. They should be well on their way South by now. Summer is over. And a sudden whoosh of melancholia took wing in graceful parabolas alongside the swallows. Summer is past: the sunshine, the light nights, the thin clothes, the pleasant mornings (it was chilly), the skin-baths in vitamin D.

Then I caught my melancholia mid-wing and retreived it as a falconer tempts home his bird. For there was nothing in flight but the swallows and my feelings and thoughts getting away from me, scribbling longhands of loss across the pond's surface. It wasn't there, even though my feelings were strong and almost palpable.
So much of my unhappiness and discontent is to do with what isn't. These created things pasted together - Frankenstein's monster like - from genes, upbringing, habits, emotional wiring and more to unleash this creature - flying with the swallows no less! - into the world of what is.

So, with my melancholia tamed and perched on leather gauntlet I looked at it and it disappeared. I've become better at spotting when I give wing to one of my many demons and let fly. I am better at seeing them now. And seeing is to have god-given sight and powers of un-creation. I hold it in attention, I name it and it becomes nothing.

So, my divine work done, I walked off through the park and took in what is again. The swans, cygnets, coots, mallards and tufted ducks all heading for the bounty of an emptied polybag full of stale bread. The late swallows going wheeee !! Morning traffic. Joggers, dog walkers. All things that ARE. All things that filled me up with the morning as step by sure footstep I walked towards my work. A walk that my melancholia would have made invisible to me if I'd let it fly. But I am slowly mastering what what is is. It is one step made into the burgeoning moment. And then the next. A step into what IS, then another. Each footstep spanning geological time and space. Deep as we're willing to plunge. Expansive as the notice we take outside ourselves.