The other morning, I awoke to a strange hue seeping through the blinds. As I lifted them, I saw a sea of blue storm clouds with a channel of golden light breaking in, splitting sky and shadows.
How often I tend to not lift the blinds as soon as I wake, reaching first for my phone. How close I came to missing this scene.
It brings to mind all that passes us when we're not looking, when we don't pause to perceive other pauses.
Like forgetting to look up long enough to watch a blackbird gliding slowly through a silver sky—to observe the pattern it makes. The place it finally lands. The quietude and ambiguity of its existence, of a gentle reprieve from its usual activity. The way it can be observed, yet not fully understood.
Our nature is different. We each have something the other doesn't. It flies through an open canvas while I can only look on, draw from it what I am able.
Or the leaves that linger on the trees in spite of the storms and the season, how their colors appear more striking, vivid, almost imperishable—with a white sky above them.
Then there is this image: one that does not come close to the real thing, yet allows the imagination to regard it as something else; the sky as ocean, the leaves as sand.
The scene brings with it a question: Is there a breaking required to heal?
Like tears that startle you with their sting, it's the breaking on my mind—of sky and season. The strange beauty in the in-between of what is unfolding. In what we observe and fail to observe, something is always being whispered to us.
Perhaps if we sit still, look up long enough to see that the sky proclaims the Lord's handiwork—surely we can see what He is showing us through it.
