Spring arrives regardless

poem by alex dimitrov

"Photography is like drinking water” is something I used to say, but I haven’t really felt that feeling in a long time.

Today was different. The wind carried a sound familiar to the past. The sun hadn’t hovered up from the mountains, but I was up and gripped by a true sense of pursuit. Then, a perfect image of my current phase: my camera battery was dead. I put that on charge and I waited for the sun to rise up and then it did, it did rise, but in my sleep, I forgot to put the switch on. Then I waited and waited more, hoping I would get one bar of charge in ten minutes, okay maybe fifteen, and that wait felt the longest; the sun shone brightly now, and my patience grew thinner and thinner. I paced around the house cursing at myself for preaching how to live a fulfilling creative life but failing to follow that for myself, a typical Solomon’s paradox. Two barbets flew across my vision, always in a pair. They come in every morning. I drifted to a memory of how the jungle babblers are called “sat-bhai” culturally because of their movement in flocks and they appear on the tree right in front of my house, the sun beaming from behind. The collective consciousness of all the birds and the trees rising to begin the day.

The fifteen minutes are up and I head out.