Ambitions

May I be honest? I love this little website of mine.

It’s the quiet corner in the cafe that no one ever occupies. You visit the cafe – not often, perhaps once every few months – knowing the small table in the corner is your hopeful destination, and there it sits, undisturbed and clean. The small wooden table uninviting to such obscenities as a laptop, with scarce enough room for a book, journal, pen. The straight-backed chair lacking all the popular appeal of fluff and curve. It is the modern-day apse.

This sweet sanctum has its own peace, and as you look you know that no one has entered that cloister since your last visit (well, perhaps two or three wayward souls who entered but once and did not return) and it has betrayed no secrets in your absence. You look at it fondly and furtively as you stand in line, hoping no one else perceives your quiet admiration or, heaven forbid!, claims that space before you have your tea in hand.

It cannot be entered without tea – or, in a pinch, a hot chocolate. Cup in hand, you walk (sneak, rather) to its confines and settle in. Look the table over, the wall beside, and let it accept you, remember you. You have brought your ambitions and high thoughts to this space and it balks at none of them:

“Care to read your book? You may finish it here! Open your journal? Lay bare your soul from this secluded seat. And the words you share here will have greater meaning than in mere conversation, a weight heavy as golden oil which defies its own gravity that fills the jar and then grows solid, pure and shareable. Only you must stay until the oil has flowed fully.”

You come to terms. There is no rush now, no time or watch or phone to spoil this space with such tawdry things as Time or Talk. All your designs – stories, Words of the Day, weekly crosswords of your own invention, artwork of oil and coal, songs in the making – all may happen and find their substance in this small space. Here there is magic.