In amongst a week of tasks and to-dos, the most marvellous little mice, invisible to all but my heart, marched into my life bearing backpacks overloaded with secrets and quiet stories that jostled me from the mundane. Little mice, smaller than a grain of sand. Don’t bother looking for them, your eyes aren’t cut out for the task. Never mind expecting proof of their existence, they’re light as a feather and when they come, you won’t even notice the weight of their feet on your skin.
I found myself looking at all the tasks at this time in my life and muttering something about “too much, too much, it’s all just too much”. I plopped down on my kitchen floor and lay nose-to-nose with my slumbering pup. He opened his tired eyes and lifted his arm, (or would that be a “front leg” in a dog) to lay it across my shoulder. He hugs me like that sometimes. So I stayed there in the affection of a good dog, both of us breathing into each other’s faces, and that gave those helpful little mice time to catch up to me. Out of the floorboards and up and over my tangle of hair, they came. An army on a mission to remind me of what it’s all about with a good and proper dosing of whimsy.
All week I evaded the mice. And the singing birds. And the moonlight serenades of wailing coyotes and calling owls. My focus needed to be on logistics for a book soon to be released to the wilds. There is food to put away for a year! Meetings to attend, emails to be sent. There are urgent, pressing tasks of life demanding my attention. There are dates to write down in an agenda, important appointments to keep. There are reservations to be made with plastic cards with looming expiry dates. And soon the plastic cards will issue me a demand for the payment of their loaned funds and I must, hastily and without delay, send them money. I am a serious adult in this serious world! I must complete and organize and take this grown-up stuff with the utmost solemnity it deserves!
There is no time to waste on making up silly songs. One mustn’t pretend or imagine. That little frog that could fit its whole family on my thumbnail is not speaking to me. The apple tree is only blowing in the wind, not whistling a song. One must plan! One must demand tangible proof! We must measure and verify, speak to show our prowess, hold opinions that would pass scientific rigour, and if they don’t, be able to back them up with those of experts that do the heavy lifting for us. We polish the prickly bits of our personality off to be pleasant in presentations and swallow our own grit to be smooth enough for consumption.
Mice don’t care. Not the invisible, smaller than a grain of salt kind anyway.
Magical mice just want you to slow down enough to notice the pretty little packages they leave behind. They want to show you the small things that you might not notice in the macro world of seriousness. They grab onto the reigns of your heart and steer you into mysterious worlds that only ask for your instinct, a hunch, your good old, (un)common sense. They offer delicious morsels that they carry around strapped on their legs and they squeal with delight, “Taste it!”, and it’s so small that if you just throw it down your gullet you miss it altogether, so you sit with it and let it melt on your tongue and you notice what food really tastes like again because you had forgotten in the big, complicated, fast-moving, machine-world that insists that food is just fuel anyway.
Phew!
That giant, outside world that insists everything is fuel. Well, a mouse army devoted to light-hearted silliness doesn’t comprehend such things. They lead by example and it’s an example I happily join in on. So we march about singing songs, wildly out of formation, climbing apple trees to peek into the secrets hiding in their knots, having a nap on the earth so the birds can lull us into la petit mort, the little death. Maybe when the big death comes, the real one, my soul will be primed and the birds will remember me well enough to send me away with that same song. Never know. Worth a shot.
Maybe you don’t have magical mice. Maybe you have magical dragonflies or winds that whisper to your heart. Maybe, like me, you sometimes find your mice in the shape of an old milk cow, or a baby calf, or a round and soft child that loosens the tethers to the made up fictions of a world and reminds you of the delights of a soul unburdened. I hope so. I hope you got it, or they, or whatever it is. Something away from all this somber and serious and I-must-labour-under-the-heaviness-of-this-world business and not enough silly and two-steppin’ and being courageous enough to play the fool for the delight of others.
There’s too many grown-ups in this place.
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