I’d never heard rose petals falling before.

I was drinking my coffee and I looked down at the roses on the little table just as petals were falling. They made a sound, soft as a moth’s wings when one flies near your face when you’re lying in your bed, thinking. Last night I was lying in my bed thinking, thinking about the difficult world, how things are worse than ever, or maybe not worse but certainly we know about each massacre, each explosion, each bombastic speech, each turning away, in a political sense and in a personal sense….as soon as it happens. They happen. Partly I want the world I’ve always loved, the one with its reliable and lovely cycles, but was it ever this? Ever this only? Or was I not paying attention? There are things I wasn’t paying attention to and now my thinking is filled with them. A tiny moth kept hovering near my face.

Yesterday I deadheaded roses. So soon their flowering is finished. Many will bloom again though not the moss roses, the deep pink and the light pink. And some climbers have grown so high that I can’t reach them, even with the pole-pruner. While I was snipping the finished blooms of the apricot climber by the garden gate, hummingbirds were darting into the honeysuckle that forms a green ceiling. It was a good place to stand for a few minutes, listening. In a big fir just beyond the tomato bed, a sapsucker was tapping.

I’d never heard rose petals falling before. Or maybe I didn’t actually hear anything but my own heartbeat. It’s hard to tell. Did I hear the moth fluttering by my face last night? When it found my reading lamp, I heard something, a quick snap as it sizzled and fell.

As I type, the news is full of famine and violence. I don’t know what to do. My own phone is silent, and there’s a story there, one I don’t want to think about. Just now I took a collection of Rumi’s poems from the stack at the back of my desk, hoping for solace.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Note: the lines of Rumi, from “Great Wagon”, were translated by Coleman Barks.