Awake

Driving my son home from Pre-k today, the sky was huge and ominous - a sky big enough to swallow you like a speck of dust. Pregnant grey rain clouds overhead threatened to burst again. But in between, patches of blue, and just enough sun to cast a soft golden glow over the suburban landscape. Rays of sunlight refused to be oppressed, forcing their way through in sharp streams of silver. My god, that sky, those clouds. I thought of the times I've stood before a Vermeer painting thinking, where are those skies? Do they even exist anymore? And here it was. Today. Just for me.

I was sitting at a stoplight, listening to Regina Spektor’s gorgeous song Samson, and everywhere I looked, the world was in technicolor bloom bathed in that golden haze. Sparrows perched on telephone wires shook the rain from their feathers and swept across wet lawns, feasting on seeds and worms. Perfection in creation. Spring. My beautiful, beautiful Spring, my favorite time of year. Signs of hope, rebirth, new beginnings. Every bud, every blade of grass poking its head through the hardened ground saying look at me! I begin again, I am reborn! And how apropos, I thought, that this should happen just as I feel my own heart is beginning to thaw,  as I shed old skin and wounds mend into silvery fine-line scars.

It was this tiny ordinary moment, sitting at a red light, when all at once, a gust of wind blew through the dogwood trees and tiny white blossoms fell like snow all around me, covering my windshield and the hood of my car, my son in his car seat giggling with wonder.

Heart-stopping. Breathless. Wonder. It overtook me, and I remembered… the world is actually a perfect place, and everything is as it should be. I forgot. I forgot for so long.

That tiny moment broke my heart. Open.

And I wept.

Because I had forgotten how it felt to be wide awake in the world.