but you don't regret a single day...

So, I leave home to work because I am easily distracted by the tv and internet. I settle down at Remedy in one of the beautiful window seats and the place is dead because everyone is watching the Grey Cup at home. But I still find myself completely distracted by the people around me.
First there were three university girls sitting at the bar right beside my chair and one of them started talking about a pizza party she was having. She said that she got a Pizza Hut flyer in the mail advertising great quantities of pizza for a minimal price. She went on to say that she thought it looked delicious but thought it was gross to order 13 pizzas by herself, so she was going to host a party. My favorite moment was when she said "I don't think I've ever been so excited about something so mundane, and without the promise of any alcohol!"

Then I managed to mark a few papers before I saw an old man riding past on an old bike with an old school bell, wearing a neon yellow hockey helmet. I think there are very few places in the world where neon yellow hockey helmets substitute for bike helmets. Yay Canada.

A little later it started to snow. Not the boring small flakes that look like heavy frost, but thick wide flakes that seem to take forever to land and follow the least linear pattern to get there. They were falling on to the sidewalk and melting almost as soon as they had hit the ground. Just as I was watching this, a little Chinese girl and her mother walked up to the street corner. They both had toques on and their hoods up. While they waited for the light to change, the mother tied the girl's hood tighter around her face while she stood there with her square backpack on and mittens pointed straight down with the tags still hanging on the side. I wondered if they were new to this kind of cold.

Just as I was thinking about packing up and changing pace, an attractive man came in and sat down just beside me. (nothing like an attractive man to keep you loyal to a place!) He found a penny on the floor under his chair as he was taking off his jacket and held it out to me, saying it was my lucky day. I laughed and he pulled out his work and started studying. He was wearing a great pair of jeans and just the right kind of brown knit sweater. It was then I noticed his feet. He was rockin' some knitted purple and green socks in a pair of sport sandals. It made me like him more. A touch of awkwardness in a person is so important.


And now I am back home, watching the weather change yet again. From snow to brilliant sun and now back to clouds and the promise of more winter. I should go work. Whether in another cafe or at my kitchen table, but the light in my living room is so perfect and its just starting to snow outside again and I can't tear myself away.

"There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world's mortal insufficiency to us...there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, precious things have been given up into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm" (Gilead, Marilynne Robinson)

There are times that I need to capture beauty. I see it as a photograph. I see the moment, the emotion, the essence of it that I want to convey and I need to capture it with my camera.

But sometimes, just noticing it and feeling the magnitude and mystery of it is honor enough.

I am listening to Sigur Ros "Von" right now, and I think you should too.