How the Sky turns to Fire

I finally got into the Zen thing I was robbed of yesterday after a couple of hours on my own this evening, mostly in the kitchen. I decided after dinner that I wanted to bake a cake and before assembling the ingredients pressed play on the cd player not knowing what was in it. I love discovering new music, paticularly when it is already loved by someone I love. Anyway the music set the right tone, but standing over the sink waiting for the cake to rise my musings about the day passed took me outside of our karatane kitchen for a moment, to a quiet place devoted to introspection.

I was thinking about the supermarket shopping today. Laurie's away so I had a whole trolley to myself, and I got to the counter and I just suddenly felt all grown up and on my own. Not the fake uneasy all grown up and on my own I used to feel shopping with Jacob, but an actual sense of freedom and unbridled opportunity that you wouldn't normally get from standing in aisle five of Pak N Save. And the place was busy, so I had time while queuing to look around at the families with trolleys spewing over and couples getting assent from each other about certain purchases, and the middle aged man in front of me putting tampons on the counter; grocery shopping was the most intimate thing in the world to be doing at that particular moment in time and I had this sudden voyeuristic wave wash over me. And with this vivid sense of being removed from it all, of my solitude, I would usually have been tempted to feel a pang of something; wistful, empty, envy, cynical. But I just felt too much to attribute it as being either negative or positive. It was just this overwhelming feeling of 'being'.

I pondered over it some more tonight at the sink, while I was trying to reclaim some of that domestic goddess I've lost touch with in recent times, with Patty Griffin's 'impossible dream' playing in the background and I remembered back sometime ago to the Manchester department in Briscoes and seeing this ancient little old man in his Sunday best hand in hand with an ancient little old woman. Together they were walking up the towel aisle so attached to the other it was unclear who was propping the other up. I felt then something similar to what I felt today in Pak N Save. A feeling that I wanted what 'they' (the people around me) had, but even more - that I wanted them to have what I thought that they had. A feeling spawned by that kick in the gutts sentimentality that I do so well.

Even after I pulled my cake out and it hadn't risen as well as I'd liked (when will I learn that there just isn't a creative licence to baking, that is why I don't like it!) and I pulled my new sweater out of the washing machine and it had morphed into a dress (yes the instructions said hand wash) I held on to that sense of 'being'. Maybe it's some delayed side effect of the substance we had Friday night for supper, maybe it's my (slow) progression through the Power of Now, maybe it's just a happy place time of the month. I dunno.