Blessings - Essay no. 6

Write about your blessings. About what it was like to wake up today, about the people you love, about the songs that have lifted your spirits. Write about the wind in the trees, or rebirth in spring, or of freedom. Write about whatever gives you life, which - especially in troubled times, we remember - is so precious. 

Prompt written by Mavis Staples in The Isolation Journals, Suleika Jaouad's Substack. 

My Saturdays of late have been drenched in pleasure. Slow starts have cascaded into long walks, conversations with friends, good films and even better food - sometimes made by my own hands, often others'. I move, on the sabbath, as I imagine a bird does on a morning after rain: slowly, and with reassurance of continued bounty on which to feast. This has happened almost without my intending, although it has not escaped my notice. 

My sabbaths are heavily guarded, I remarked to a friend, and essential with the busyness of my weeks. If I don't set aside this one day on which I don't check my work emails or tweak my planning, I lose touch with reality beyond teaching, and the world beyond the four walls of my classroom. On the sabbath, I sleep and play and read for extended periods as on no other day of the week. If, on first waking, my body protests, I listen, roll over, and return to the land of sleep. I allow myself culinary treats - a pastry, a coffee, a cookie. I turn my eyes and ears and hands towards beauty. 

This sabbath practice has kept me human for almost a year now. I can no longer imagine my weeks without it, nor do I want to. But I am aware of contentment seeping into my life not just from this one full cup, a respite, a well, an anomaly. 

Contentment creeps in at school, when a child hugs me as if she can't help it, arms wrapped firmly around my waist. It takes me by surprise when I stretch my legs in bed at the end of a long day, happily aching from a day's labour in heels. I find contentment in a patch of afternoon sunlight on my orange armchair; it arrives at just the right time for me to sink into it with a book. My physical surroundings, with their quotidian, suburban beauty, feed contentment continuously. On walks, I ponder and notice, along with Mary Oliver, "the sweet, electric drowse of creation." 

Pay attention/be astonished/tell about it writes Mary Oliver in that same poem. I will.