📻 Barefoot in December
Daily paradoxes: no electricity, unfinished laundry, compass directions.
I am not afraid, and precisely for that reason I want to highlight the daily paradoxes — the small, forever pushed-aside occurrences that, in truth, touch us the deepest. A person can be completely transformed simply because everyday life continues. It does not end, nor vanish into smoke.
Everyday life is present.
It is form, geometry; it is a sacred possibility of existence, while the unexpected and seemingly disruptive daily paradoxes reveal the hidden and tell of what matters most.
Who ever said that everyday life must be gray?
It is a discovery.
🎧 Jasmine’s Latvian voice accompanies this text — JASMININE original sound from Georgia. A bell begins. Not perfect, still here. Listen slowly.
Yesterday’s strong wind has calmed. It is the beginning of December, yet you can still roam outside barefoot. I walk through the yard, gathering fallen branches — there are many.
There is no electricity, but no one cares anymore. You keep living.
Simply live, human.
The washing machine has stopped mid-cycle. It is silent, though inside it is full of wet, unfinished laundry. In the round window, the damp clothes look clumped together — like human thoughts on certain days.
I press the light switches on the wall, as if they could change something, solve something. Ha!
The neighbor calls her cows home, looks at my bare feet, and does not understand.
Perhaps a southern woman, forever shod, will never fully grasp a northern daughter without socks, without shoes. She will marvel, yes — and for me, oh, how fitting that is.
I stand at the crossroads of the compass directions, where north, south, west, and east each pull their own way, even when there is no electricity.
And what a wonder… Electricity is back.
The washing machine growls in the corner of the kitchen, begins to shake, and picks up speed.
The wind rocks the world, touching it lightly.
For a long time I did not know how to value life in the countryside, as often happens to a former city dweller, a European. I was here, in Georgia’s primal fields, yet I wanted something else.
Perhaps that is why power outages still strike me as opportunities to awaken, to see, to feel.
Light, its movement. The stove smoking. The scent of burning firewood. Heat gathering strength. Towels drying on the clothesline.
And what if all of this is me as well? Not only the polished façade, the polished words, the perfume on the skin.
How is it, human?
Barefoot in the night -
JASMININE by Jasmine Monta
Writer & ritual artisan. I laugh often. I love being JASMININE.
Image: Cottonbro via Pexels, fine tuned by me
It is getting better. Thank you, world!