Point of View: Marvelous Activity

It is time to talk of the outdoor shower, that blessed sanctuary among the trees and birds and light in which one can revel six months long before driven inside to the fire, a pleasure of a different kind.

Whether in the shower, which has a bench, or by the fire, one can read, and that is something she and I do habitually — to no end that I know of in her case except the pleasure that she takes in it.

I, on the other hand, used to think that the more I read the more I would know, but that has not turned out to be so. As I — I believe it was I, or at least the I that says it’s me — once said, if I were to reread what I’d deemed a worthy book several times probably every line would wind up underlined.

Still, I’m reluctant to let go of the evidence, in the office and at home, that mine is a well-stocked mind. Classics stuffed in shelves, classics heaped on the floor. How could a visitor in looking around after I’m gone not exclaim what an improved brain was his, crammed with truth and beauty.

What I’m reading now, however, counsels against such striving in favor of merely looking about, as one often tends to do in an outdoor shower, and marveling at life as it is now, uncensoriously.

Maybe that is what is so wonderful about an outdoor shower, for in it and akin with nature you’re less inclined to think metaphorically, it simply being what it is.

You’re less inclined, in the sun and the trees and the birds, to worry about the future or to fret about the past. Less inclined too to pick up a book — which one can do in our shower inasmuch as it has a bench — to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.

Less inclined in the joy of the moment to think someday, someday I will be wise.

Miraculous power and marvelous activity — drawing water and hewing wood!

And showering out of doors!