May 27
You never enjoy the world aright until the sea itself flows in your veins and you wear the sky like a garment.
Centuries of Meditations (freely rendered)
Listening mode
You never enjoy the world aright until the sea itself flows in your veins and you wear the sky like a garment.
When a cherry tree from the neighbouring property grows over the wall, half of it blossoms into your yard in spring. You don't have to do anything for it: no pruning, no watering, no fetching a ladder. It may well be that you take a lighter pleasure in it than its owner, who knows it mainly as work.
The pleasure you take in things that don't belong to you has a peculiar weakness, though. You can't decide anything for them. If someone comes along one day with a saw, you have no right to object. All you are left with is a loss that nobody but you considers yours.
But owning something seldom makes you more attentive. What you are sure of, you look at less often. So there are two ways of having a share in the world, and each lacks something: one owns it and hardly notices it any more. The other notices it and has no claim to it.
Perhaps one day you'll mention it to your neighbour, almost in passing, over the wall. He hadn't known that the tree blossoms for you too.
