Seventy-Four

Day Seventy-Four:  European Memories Series #6

The View From Green Park

The first day I took the tube alone I didn’t know where I was going.  I got on the Picadilly Line and got off at a stop that sounded nice.  It happened to be Green Park and I sat in one of those chairs in the sun that apparently cost a pound but I didn’t know at the time.  I sunk back, let my head rest against the back of the chair, and looked off at the tree’s beyond which sat Buckingham Palace.  I suppose there were tree’s, I can’t remember seeing them it was rather sunny, but I knew they were there.  That’s a lot of things in my life:  I can’t specifically see them or hear them, but I feel their presence. 

That day was the first day I knew that even though people were changing in my life, and the person I was was different than who left Canada to get there, and that Canada was changing without, and around me things were happening, I knew in my little being that everything, and I mean everything, was going to be fine.  I remember taking a deep breath and it was so cold and different and new and happy that I just was the most relaxed (and I meditate daily) and it was the absolute best rest I’ve ever had.  After being so furiously lost on the tube in the station and confused by the people and the city being so overwhelmingnly large and intimidating and being away from my family and people I loved and new people in my life who were so important and people who were already in my life and changing our relationships were changing and I just knew that it would be fine.  This chair, this stolen piece of relaxation that I had taken from the City of London for just a moment allowed me to realise that if I just sat with these thoughts and feelings, acknowledged them, and let them happen, that it would be fine.

I was fine!  And then I got kicked out, so I bought a Pret brownie and skipped down the tube station home.  How boring is that?  Well it wasn’t to me, it was significantly the opposite of boring, but it seems to mundane now.  After tubing so often to Covent Garden alone to go shopping or to the spa or to the Thames and the markets and walking everywhere home and around and all over the city it seems so mundane to be so graciously proud of myself to have tubed just to Green Park for a brownie and a sit.  But it really was that huge for me, sitting, alone, in a city that I’ve dreamt about since my childhood, and there I was man, I had made it.

I keep saying that over and over and it’s not because I don’t have anything else to say, but that’s just what happened for me.  I MADE IT.  There’s a space above my desk in Guelph and it is waiting for a poster sized picture from my trip but I can’t decide from where.  Every city I’ve been to has atleast one very good beautiful poster-esque picture, and yet I am inclined to just blow up a big picture of Pentonville Road, or the random ones from inside Covent Garden, but it will most likely be of the Thames. 

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