The desire to be everywhere at once. Another summer Saturday, and the cross-town drive to the East Side farmer’s market at Trout Lake. Peaches so summer-ready that one bite finds your chin running juices. Sweet corn, and salad greens. Fresh-baked bread; and radishes that shout “Red!”

We wander among the booths, among each other, savouring everything the senses bring. This is not shopping, this is replenishment. Immersion in the moment like a string suspended in a super-saturated sugar solution, crystals conjured from it like a necklace of sweet diamonds magically invoked.

I stop in my tracks, and let the slow stream of others flow around me. Taking it all in: our pleasure in each other’s company. Sunshine, soft laughter, kids bent down to pet the patient dogs on leads. The shade of trees, the busker halfway down the crowd who offers songs from beneath her parasol. Pottery, and the casual bartering of daily news. Standing still I feel suspended in it, and tears spring to the corners of my eyes. There is no better place to be than here, and now.

It is as if I were a radio tuned to the evident happiness broadcast by all others. In Buddhist texts the word for this is mudita or “sympathetic joy”. There is a longing to take root here: to sink my teeth into this present, perfect moment. But I want to be there and there and there as well.

And I begin to understand Rilke’s line, expressing his desire to be: “distributed in equal, almost weightless parts among the stars”

Nothing is like something else. What is not wholly
alone with itself, what thing can really be expressed?
We name nothing. All we can do
is tolerate, acquaint ourselves
with a single fact: here a sudden brilliance
or there a glimpse momentarily grazes us
as if it were precisely that in which resides
what our life is. Whoever resists
will have no world. Whoever grasps too much
will overlook the infinite. Meanwhile,
during such huge nights we are out of danger,
distributed in equal, almost weightless
parts among the stars. How they urge us on.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Capri, April 17, 1908;
translated by Franz Wright