December 3 – Moment.

Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

Just about an hour or so ago, actually, I was out on a walk. It’s crisp and grey with bouts of golden and occasional yellow. I wasn’t wearing my headphones, and instead was hearing what my normally overly-stimulated ears never get a chance to hear above the earbuds. A cacophony of birds. Not the usual doves, but cawing birds. Maybe crows, but I never could find where the sounds originated, and crows just aren’t that common around here. There was that and the rattlescrape whisper of the few leaves clinging to the last bit of brittle life, and those who proceeded them to the ground along the asphalt. And chimes and chimes and chimes, reminding me to appreciate people and their desire for beauty in spite of it all.

And I heard these things loudly and pervasively until my mind got lost in them and then some more abstract, inner noised distracted me from focusing on those sounds, and soon I realized there was no more call-and-response of man-made vs. natural beauty, but just the whooshing of cars the whooshing of cars the whooshing of cars and my own thoughts, whooshing, drowning out that which I should have been directly experiencing. And I wondered if the sounds truly didn’t exist…or if I just wasn’t hearing them anymore.