\n

I am about to take Jones to daycare.
\nI want something magical to happen.
\nI want us to see a UFO or a burning bush, I want an owl to suddenly appear before us, it’s wings spread in revelation.<\/p>\n

There is very light snow covering the patches of grass lining the sidewalks. The grass, still green, pokes through it–a kind of stubble. Jones thinks he sees a dragon in a window so we pause to get a better look. We are blocking the sidewalk and I sense a person coming up behind us. I shuffle to the left and mumble an apology. A college-aged woman stops and smiles, stands before us. She is beautiful in the morning. Long autumn hair. She could have stepped out of a magazine. Or a forest. She is smiling, waiting, waiting to help, I realize. I tell her we\u2019re okay and she says something charming and warm, and then vanishes like some spirit in a dream. All the lives she will pass through. And coming toward us is a young man, a student. He is running, loping easily down the street just as natural and easy as a cloud drifting in the sky. I know him. He is the son of a man I went to university with 30 years ago. Suddenly the past opens up on the street, and I am back at McGill with his father, his dad running toward me with a baseball after collecting an errant throw. And then as his son waves at us I am summoned back, watching as he runs beyond us and into his future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am currently taking part in a program that encourages attention. This was today’s exercise:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":7257,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[644,859,3530,378,742,4239,897,4610,707,38,448],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7256"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7256"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7258,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7256\/revisions\/7258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/michaelmurray.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}