the conundrum of rats.

okay,  the rat is still really gross

Just returned from Bermuda.  It is an idyll.  and now am in New York.  the difference between the two places is so bizarre I can hardly hold it all. in the city there are so many realities jostling side by side, it's easy to shut down and pay no attention at all.  But if you decide to open, you find that  the veneer is thin. You can lift up the veil and peer underneath pretty easily.  and  this is exactly what i love about the city.  and love it i do, even if i'm done living here for the minute.   

 

I walked to the hudson river and dreamed my way along one of the Jettys.   suddenly a huge swarm of dragon flies descended.  seemingly hundreds of  these creatures,  quite big,  swooping and diving like helicopters around my head and up into the trees.  

a group of school kids aged about  8 or 9 began to scream at the dragonflies and swat them away. i tried to capture these antics on my little point and shoot camera but it wasn't quick enough.  a few feet a way two men fiddled with a movie camera and engaged in deep and serious discussion about something,  the dragonflies and swatting kids didn't exist in their reality.  a little further on  a painfully thin woman posed for a photo with her daughter, a group of tourists moved past, keeping close to each other as if floating through this reality and watching from inside a translucent bubble. and all the while, off in the distance, the statue of liberty lifted  her flame, still  celebrating an idea of freedom, in spite of everything that's gone on in the last 8 years.   

at the edge of the park,  people sat with their dogs reading the paper and lay sunbathing right on the concrete while underneath them, in the river,  float the detritus of modern life.   A single shoe, a HUGE bloated RAT, pale green and hairless now,  a giant feather, a swathe of plastic, bits of wood and garbage.   i focused on the rat.  gagged and began a whole big story in my head  about how gross the city is etc..  then i had to laugh.   so what did i think,  that  the rats in the barn on the farm are somehow easier to deal with than rats running through kitchens and over the garbage and floating in huge polluted bodies of water?

that's the reality i decided to go along with,  that i prefer country rats to city rats.   hey and what about the rats in Bermuda?  they are huge but perhaps less horrifying because they live in that little paradise?   did i decide somewhere along the line that the country rats are cleaner or more honest than the tough packs of rats in the city?   Could there be such a thing as an honest rat? A rat is a rat. It just is. I’m the one with all the thoughts and opinions and judgments of things. And how is it possible ever to judge when in one 30 minute stroll along the Hudson river so many different lives are playing out. Layers and layers of reality, all easily glimpsed if you stop for a second and watch.   if nothing else,  what a divine little game!