Noticing the slant light

How to get through it.

A little mood music for you while you read :)

It happens when I’m driving. Always when I’m driving, music turned up, and I catch a sentence. Maybe two. 

I grab the words by the tail like Ruth Stone. I write some lines in my head and then suddenly it’s all tumbling out like some kind of divining.

Or when the sunlight is streaming through slant, cut by the blinds and held by swirls of dust or dark storm clouds or the pink blossoms of a crabapple tree, the branches so lush with flowers it’s almost indecent.

I feel it most when the shutter clicks on my camera and I capture the light just so and my capacity for hope expands in my chest.

It’s going to a dance class for the first time in nearly 15 years and seeing all kinds of women in heels and fishnets leave their sensuality on the floor. Sparing nothing, using it all up just for them.

It’s me doing the same. I walk out of the room covered in new bruises, hair a mess, just for me.

I find it while I watch a woman walk down the street, she stops at the lilac bushes and leans into the blooms unabashedly, eyes closed. She takes her fleeting spring pleasures without shame before it all wilts into summer. 

I do it too, pulling the spikes of purple flowers to my nose and I’m transported back to Grandma’s house, her row of lilacs. How I would smell the flowers and the dust of the dirt road as I drove by, windows down. 

Two honks for hello. One more honk for I love you. Grandpa waves from his window, Nascar or John Wayne on his TV, cigarette burning like an afterthought in his rough mechanic's hand.

I find it when the rain runs down the windshield of my truck and the neon glow of the city is refracted. I sit for just a small moment before hitting the wipers. Just one more moment lingering before I go.

Because I’m always going.

I find it every time I work my ass off for the life that I have. Every word I’ve written. There must be thousands. Hundreds of thousands of words that got me here, all the run-ons and grammatical errors and everything I’ve done for myself.

I find it when a dear friend comes over in the morning to help make food, the idle chat as she slices a fennel bulb.

How another friend cuts tulips from her yard, we walk around as she gathers a bouquet just for me. And another friend offers me an orange — so simple and yet a small unplanned sweetness is enough to pull me up. 

How people show up to care for me when I ask. 

And I just have to ask, what a blessing that is.

I find it when I linger with June on a perfect spring night. We take the long walk home just to feel the air, just to see the streetlights pop on one by one.

There’s nothing to rush off to and there’s so much night unfolding. God what I would give to stay in that small moment, just for a little while longer.

We’re all getting through something. And none of it lasts.

If we can slowly turn from the hard something towards a slice of daily beauty, the hard something gets a little smaller. Maybe it’s only for 5 minutes. Maybe the hard something eventually fades into the background and we’re content for a time.

All I know is I find peace every time I sit in a circle of strangers and listen to their stories of hope and hard. 

All I know is I find myself every time I offer gentleness to someone else, every time the light hits just right and I take 15 seconds to notice it, every time the chorus sings me home.

That’s all there is, after all. I hope you find it too.