laundry day

splashing around

I am writing to you in the twenty minutes of the wash cycle. It’s twenty three minutes but I used the first three to get change across the street at the corner store (they gave me change…). Sunlight streams through the window of the laundromat and it’s empty except for me, a guy, and the woman who works here. All the washers and driers are here too but I guess I was only counting sentient beings. Who decides who is sentient? Water rushes through the washing machines and water rushes through people too. Sometimes the knowledge that we are mostly water offers me solace, other times I wonder how entities that are composed of majority water can wreak so much havoc on a planet that is, like us, also mostly water. Is that coming from the other ingredients we are composed of, and by ‘that’ I guess I mean our penchant for destruction? Hard to say.

The laundry never ends, and neither do the dishes, and neither does the peeing, and neither do the showers. And maybe it’s not tedium, it’s that we need rinsing, cleansing, washing that often. Separate some material (filth, scraps, toxins) from other material (the rest of us?).

Brian Lesage asked what if you related to all the thoughts rushing through your head at any given moment as rain? Not all that is in your atmosphere even comes from you, some of it is just passing through on its way from cloud to ocean. Maybe the thoughts are Not So Personal, not your shortcoming either. You could just notice, let the water run. You can’t control your thoughts anymore than you can control the weather, but you can choose how to relate, for example, with neutrality or even friendliness (god forbid).

H 2 Oh no. The stains are dissipated, returned; constitutive elements. It’s still on. They say water is life: it washes us, and all of our little belongings. It jumps out of fountains, runs down, runs through.