patience and the piñata

"Virago," "pachyderm," and "residual self image" came to greet me on the wispy trip from dreams to wakefulness this morning. There was nothing special or insistent or linked about them: They just seemed to be there like a fire hydrant on the street corner.

Nearby or later or something, there was a New England field-stone wall across "my street." Someone had built it and it was miraculously straight in the manner of field-stone walls -- all those irregularly-molded hunks and bits and pieces of greying rock shaped into something that was neat and straight and exuded the quiet patience of the builder.

In nature, if there is a straight line, you can bet that some human being has been mucking about ... or anyway I think the generalization holds pretty much true: Nature doesn't do straight lines and it doesn't do patience though I don't think this means nature is in business to contradict such matters either.

Sometimes I wonder if it is the lazy impatience that seems to make life cheaper these days. A cell phone is the first thing that comes to mind -- sleek and capable and failing to come through with the peace it promises but does not deliver. The impatient mind creates and praises and then wonders why things feel so dreadfully empty. It takes practice to be patient without any hope of a return on the investment.

It takes practice to get with the program: Things move on, so letting them do that makes a lot of sense. But there is "residual self image" to bar the way, impatiently asking to be "awakened" or "compassionate" or "empty" or "at peace" or some other piñata-like surprise.

Patience that carries no meaning (including "no meaning") ... the patience of a pachyderm combined with the fierceness of the virago and depicting a residual image that never was or was not.

Laziness deadens the nerve endings and patience hardly revives them. But at least with patience, the image in the bathroom mirror is not so unfulfilled.