It's foggy outside as I back down the driveway toward the street and store. I notice the droplets of mist collected on the edges of the pepper tree leaves. Dangling like glass ornaments, glistening in the early sunshine. Everything is quiet and cool and has an edge of mystery. A morning where you want to snuggle, to hunker down by a fire on a comfy couch.
It's spring and things are slowly starting to feel like a new year. Past clean up after the holidays and getting used to writing the new year's date. I am 53 this year and still feel as if I know nothing or am discovering so much for the first time. Life happens all around you, and often you feel like a child in the center of a freeway. People, like cars, flying past. Hell bent on something though they don't know what.
Then that moment happens. That clear and transforming moment. That, no matter how small or how strange, hits you and everything is clear. All those moments in your life, all those crystal bright and transforming "notices" from God- are right in front of you.
The morning sight of the water droplets hit me like that. Chandelier glass hanging from the bright green leaves. Reflecting the sparkles of morning light. Reflecting tiny landscapes as I backed out. I saw the trees on my childhood street. The feel of the dropped seeds underfoot back then. Leaves and tiny branches. The lacey shade. My bare feet in the summers where I worked so hard to toughen the soles. To prove I was a wild Southern Californian kid. To be on vacation from school and rules and shoes. Why this was so important I am not quite sure at this point in my life. Maybe it was the Tom Sawyer in me, the Tarzan (the Jane), the tom boy. Maybe I was just being a kid.
In tiny moments we find the perfection of the universe, if we just notice. A child hugging a parent. A hand holding another's. The way the setting sun slips through the colors of sunset as it falls down the horizon. How clear those moments can become. How permanent in our memories. I am lucky to have so many good memories. So many good to overlap the sad. There are so many with clear but horrible overlapping memories in their lives. Ever replaying. Those who are frightened, surviving, enduring and those running from things they cannot get out of their hearts and heads. One wishes they could help with that. My heart, in the darkness before I sleep, prays for that. To help, to understand. To mend. At least those I know about. To protect those hurting because I too have felt that. Wouldn't it be nice if we all acted upon those feelings? To help others flourish?
Sometimes the news is just a barrage of hate and reaction of one broken soul against another. I guess that's what we are here to learn. I certainly have my own lessons to remember. To recognize the growth toward self betterment and act on it. To see the need to do so and to be more than we are. Inside and out.
I know the sight of a perfect pepper leaf and droplets shouldn't move me to such deep ponderings. Then again, who am I to fight the need to be better? Or the clear little messages that are sent? So expertly by things and those so much bigger than ourselves? And- the droplets looked really cool.