Impulse purchases don’t always work out for me, and frequently there is a deep sense of buyer’s remorse that comes trickling or flooding in later on.  But today at Target was a very interesting thing.  I’m coming down with a cold and I’m on an herbal remedy, but between the two sometimes I get to feeling slightly looped – not a feeling I relish.  But I just let myself go with it today, and I wandered around Target in something of a daze.  And that dazed walk through Target – with no list, and in fact not being able to remember all of what I wanted to get all at once – was one of the more relaxing things I’ve done of late.  I didn’t poke about, and I managed to be thorough and timely, both.  And in the midst of all the things I had planned on purchasing, I also bought a set of hammock ties.

Now, what you need to know is that I had no idea whether or not there were adequate trees adequately spaced in my new backyard to support a hammock, tied.  And ordinarily I would not do this sort of thing, even if the set of ties cost under $15, I wouldn’t do it anyway.

And yes, I do have a hammock – regifted to me after my mother didn’t want it – originally from El Salvador.  It’s a delightfully colorful thing, and once I was ensconced in it, swaying gently side to side and looking up through the twisted and gnarled bare branches to the crystaline blue sky above, it dawned on me that even if it hadn’t worked out in my back yard, I could have taken it camping with me and it will be a heck of a lot more comfortable than sleeping on the ground, I can tell you that for certain.  This, of course, I only thought once I was already in it.

And so for a blissful fifteen minutes before I gathered my things to go inside and do other holy things, I swung in the breeze and chatted with friends on the phone.  Honestly, if my throat didn’t hurt, I might still be out there now, napping or reading one of the two books I had on my lap.

And it dawns on me that we all need moments of allowing ourself to be cradled and rocked by the hammock of life.  These are moments that we need to have every day, even if at first we need to carve them out with a butcher knife.  We need them, and I have a sneaking suspicion that after a while they get easier and easier, until one day we realize that despite what everyone else says, we’re always cradled in the hammock of life.  Every moment of every day.  All we  have to do is accept it, and I think we will have found that we’ve always had what we’ve always thought we had to search for elsewhere.  That’s what I suspect, anyway.