Tripping the Light Fantastic

Sometimes daylight trips me and I tumble into wonder. I’ll be walking along and suddenly I am overcome with a breathtaking intensity of awareness. I stop in my tracks and behold the world.

I was waiting for Monte in a parking lot (of all places) just a few days ago, and he caught a glimpse of me in that mode.

“You were just standing still,” he later said, “and you had a forty-yard gaze.”

What was I looking at? Across the highway, there were golden hills, parched dry with summer, studded with the dark green shapes of valley oaks, and on one slope was a plain white cross, and beyond, a winding road.

In the parking lot where I stood, heat radiated from the ground and the storefronts and the automobiles, and people were coming and going, pushing their grocery carts, carrying keys and cell phones and sundry packages, just coming and going, as though this was an ordinary morning.

But nothing was ordinary. Everything was shining. And it was all in slow motion, and we were suspended in time, recipients of this instant, in all of eternity, to be, and bear witness.

The light poured over me. I felt fully alive and yet hardly there, a fleeting fragment of the scene, on the cusp of disappearance.

But it was a moment that would never come again, and I knew it.

This happens. It’s a curious phenomenon, but I think it’s a good thing.