saturated presence

It’s that melty feeling when you fall asleep at the lake watching the sun dappled through the trees.

Or when you go on vacation and a whole afternoon slips away and you idly wonder where you should go out for dinner.

The ache in your jaw when you laugh SO HARD with your girlfriends over a bottle of wine that the whole evening is a giddy blur.

When your big kid is sick and suddenly climbs on you again and you get to hold them in your arms like you did when they were little, breathing in each precious second knowing full well this might be the last chance for this particular sweetness.

It’s the feeling that every TV commercial is trying to sell you. The slow sensuousness of sun on skin; the party that is so good that the night is eternal; the cozy moment so golden that it glows in memory.

That moment when you want to close your eyes and just soak it all in because this, this, this.

It’s what makes all the hard work of being human worth it.

I have been searching my whole life for words to describe this feeling.

Some people might call it life force.

Or joy.

The closest I can come to putting words to this liquid gold feeling is saturated presence. It’s when I’m here and I know I’m here and the moment is overflowing with richness.

Every summer, I go in search of saturated presence.

It’s exactly the opposite of rushing from thing to thing to thing.

It’s slow by nature, a moment filled to its very max.

It’s when there’s a kind of shimmer.

I wrote a whole book of poems about trying not to miss it.

And to be honest it’s the very opposite of how I’ve mostly felt the past two weeks, which was rushing-rushing-rushing from thing to thing. Joyous things! Wonderful things! Prom! Baseball games! Our daughter’s high school graduation! Middle school band concert! A wonderful visit from my parents! But I had such a hard time plunking myself down into those experiences because my mind was rushing ahead, doing the mental math of when we needed to leave for the next thing, what needed to be packed, what needed to be washed.

It is perhaps then no surprise that the world did its best to slow me down. Another car died and had to be jumped. The kitchen sink began leaking (thank goodness Saint Dad was there to fix it!) The dryer kept tumbling, but refused to put out Any Heat At All. And most annoyingly, my fancy new phone, which came equipped with a seemingly-endless fountain of memory and storage and icloud, has declared that it simply cannot and keeps looking for a fainting couch to faint upon.

Of course this only made me race faster and feel more frantic. But the whole time I kept hearing the insistent voice of my own poems: don’t miss it, don’t miss it.

Finally one afternoon, in spite of the bajillion things that still crowed and plucked at me to do them, my mom and I walked down to the beach.

It was hot, and crowded, and bright. Not a place that felt holy or sacred or peaceful in the slightest. But there was an implicit permission to a space so filled with people determinedly loafing: lying on towels, passing out popsicles, floating on floaty things, reading paperbacks. We kicked off our shoes and stood with our feet in the icy water. It was so cold that it shocked me awake. My feet sent waves of cool up my spine, and the sun beat down hot on our backs, and the water rushed gently back and forth, and finally finally I found myself in my body, outside time, just swaying back and forth with the saturation of the moment.

Oh there you are, feet. Oh hello, hands. Hello, sun, hello water, hello my beloved mom.

And hello me, sweet anxious human, oh look, you slowed down for a moment and the world didn’t end— in fact here it is, waiting gently for you the whole time. Waiting for you to touch down. Waiting for you to arrive.

Soon enough it was time to walk back home and make dinner, but I kept a little bit of that shimmer in me.

Because saturated presence is not as fleeting as happiness. Happiness is a hummingbird that shows up out of nowhere— it’s so blithe and innocent we often only recognize it later.

This is more intentional, like joy recognizing itself and holding its own gaze in the mirror.

I forgot that the biggest thing I’ve learned about saturated presence is that we don’t have to wait for it to fly in and anoint us; we can create it.

A walk to the nearest bit of water. A tiny ritual. The glass of wine on the porch before dinner. The cup of coffee by the window before everyone else wakes up. A flower that demands your full attention. A hand against a tree’s friendly bark. A hug that you hold for a full minute.

These things are so close by, and yet I forget them all the time. I live up in my head, in my to-do list, in the mundane details.

But no matter how far away we go from ourselves, we can always return.

The ocean is always there.

And so are our vast tiny shimmering hearts.

love,

Katherine