It’s morning in Manhattan. I’m sitting in an apartment, drinking coffee, eating toast and talking. I like this. The laughter, the conversation, the sounds of the street outside — cars honking and wind blowing — and I listen.

Toast crunches, the newspaper turns, paper rustles like dead leaves blowing in an autumn wind. My journal rests on the pillow beside me. I scribble poetry.

We’re all doing our own activity: crocheting, a crossword, scribbling notes; we sip coffee — one cup, then another — no music, no TV, just the sounds of our crafts and the dog who rests in the nook of the fireplace.

A comment or a question arises, a word to oneself.

Beyond the window I glimpse windows into other rooms, like me, looking out to you — grey and white, white and blue, stone and brick and metal.

City life.

Reaching through the glass pane are shadows of lost innocence, echoes of our pleas. The page, the pillow, the message of the eyes, I see more than boxed up rooms, but evanescent dreams.

Time weaves. I’m sitting in the silence. Through me flows the river of potential. And what is potential? Innocence burned by the spark of experience, rekindled as wisdom.

The streets are wise. Potential abounds with every step upon the pavement. Potential may be emptiness; potential strikes as a blessed stormy night. Potential smolders, an ease amid uncertainty.

I think I have a plan for life.

The plan is to write about the things I feel and the things I see and how I hope to live differently. Writing is all that seems to make sense to me. I want to create, continually emptying the well within.

New York City. Will I live here one day? It’s a beautiful thing to truly not know what the future holds.

Across the way sits a bird upon an air conditioning box.

This is what I care about, not politics, as the conversation often arises, but what’s right here before me, the potential for connection, understanding, wonder, love. Have we lost the art of observation?

Listening, watching, waiting for the bird to leap, I find a reason to forego the dire pace of modernity.

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