On Lying Down in That Grass (The World is Too Full to Talk About)

The sun spilled gold across the pavements.
I wandered without purpose,
moving through the streets like a flâneur —
one of those quiet wanderers of old Paris, observing, savouring, belonging nowhere and everywhere at once.

I found a chip stand.

From the radio, a voice rose into the air —
"Don't you want me, baby?"
The man behind the stand started singing, his voice full of easy joy. I joined in.
We stumbled through the lyrics, smiling, basking in the bright, golden moment.

That shared nostalgia — from a voice of an era I'd never lived,
a memory borrowed from the 80s,
a time that seemed to carry a presence we rarely touch now.

And standing there, smiling at a chip stand,
with another customer nearby,
I felt it —
the ghost of a previous embarrassment,
the old self-consciousness that would once have coloured a moment like this — wasn’t there.
It had fallen away, like a coat shrugged off in the first days of spring.

Only freedom remained.

I went to pay.
He shook his head, smiling wide.
"Keep them," he said. "You made my day."

As I floated off towards the tube station,
behind me, he started singing another love song, his voice spilling easily into the golden afternoon.

I passed three men collecting charity donations.
I casually offered them some of my chips.
Only the first man accepted —
within me, the ghost of old guilt and annoyance was gone.

I walked on, smiling to myself.

And I thought:
How often do we close our hearts when we could offer something simple — a smile, a chip, a voice, a little piece of ourselves?

And I thought too of all the times my reveries were misunderstood —
when it was simply a drifting away,
to another time, another place,
when mundane realities were too difficult to bear.

Can you sing even if strangers stare with unease?

Can you embrace an oak tree, not minding who sees?

"When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about" —
as you set aside your fears and worries
(your clothes and feet now dirty)
to dissolve and soften into the earth.

Maybe it isn't about striving.
Maybe it's about slowing down —
and shifting the way we see.

We are not here to control it.
We are here to dance with it —
to sing when the music finds us,
to give when our hearts spill over,
to weave poetry into the fabric of everyday life,
to find beauty waiting in the cracks and corners,
to move like dreamers — free, light, awake.

Travel lightly.