Open your eyes

The bare branches of the tree outside my window, lit from below as the sun sinks below the horizon.  There’s something painfully, heartbreakingly gorgeous about the flaming ends of things: leaves at their highest pitch of color, the glow of the last light before dusk.  This light comes from below the horizon, and is full of something beyond the edge of our knowing.  It sings a song, part dirge and part hymn of praise, of something more abstract and more powerful than our singular human existence.

An airplane traces straight line across the cornflower blue sky.  Like drawings in the sand at low tide, this mark is bold, but fleeting.  Look again and the bald white line is gone.  Subsumed again into the great cycles of life, against the background of which the linear paints its path and then fades, again and again.

This light is an elegy.  It contains a endless number of farewells and endings, but also, so much beauty.  Against the stark, full blueness of a late-day sky, the light holds much emotion that I experience it as an almost animate thing.

A blazed of red against the sidewalk.  If you didn’t look down you’d miss it.  Luckily, my children are that much closer to the ground – literally and figuratively – and they are constantly pulling my eye and my attention to details I might otherwise overlook.

Even as we turn towards the most barren of seasons, as we hurtle into the months of curling inward, there are many treasures to be found.  Look closely enough and the world reveals its majesty, in the smallest corners (the sidewalk) and across the grandest canvases (the sky).  In the upcoming months the splendor is quiet, hushed.  It reveals itself only to the patient observers and to those willing to accept that joy has many shapes.  So take your time.  Open your eyes.

As Annie Dillard says, what you see is what you get.