Chimes

All day the wind has been in the trees. I am reading next to the window when I look up in anticipation. Another sound barely breaks through the silence: the barest note of the little chimes hanging over the front door, so obscure that the breeze seldom encounters them enough to coax out a little note. After another tentative note, the chimes fall silent.

A bird calls, more loudly than the chimes were, and then the wind in the trees returns. I decide the chimes have given up, or perhaps the breeze does not want to exhaust them; they are so modest and the wind in the trees so strong. I look out the window. The chimes are trembling ever so gently but not enough to emit another sound.

A butterfly careens from bush to tree to flower to shrub, a wild zig-zag course. Perhaps the wind has got hold of it and it cannot stop to test a flower. The butterfly disappears, then whirls back in crazy flight an instant later. The chimes want to make a sound but fall silent. In the foreground, somewhat startling, a bug slowly crosses the window pane.

As a child I grew up with a room of my own but used it only for sleeping because it seemed oppressively uncomfortable, as if it belonged to someone else. Ever since, I have not cared to have a room, and utilize a corner of the house to sit, surrounded by books, with a lamp and with a futon on the floor, my lap as my writing table.

If I am at this spot I can think, read, daydream, wonder, focus, or be empty. But then I am away from the window, missing something. And at the window, I will miss what can be done in the corner. And reading at the window I miss both. And so it is at every spot, every junction, every turn of mind and body. Perhaps that is how the butterfly feels in its zig-zag course, or the chimes when they wonder one moment to make a sound, another not to.