This moment

It's a misty, foggy, insubstantial morning where the world beyond my window looks and feels like a lingering dream. Inside it's cool and the Van Morrison on the speakers is punctuated by the thunder of kitten paws as they run and wrestle around my feet. Behind me, curled in the chair he has claimed as his, the Labrador is quite noisily doing something best left unspoken. It's a perfect morning for me, a common day touched by the mystical, warm, comforting and marked with moments of the ridiculous.

I wonder how long I'll be able to linger in this little set-apart time before I have to re-enter the "real world." How long will I be able to keep this gentle, glowing contentment in my chest? Can I maintain while scraping cat fur from the rugs or folding the laundry? Is it possible to do bills in this rare emotional state?

I'd like to think that I could carry this appreciative awareness with me as I go about my day, as I imagine cloistered monks can do, traipsing between the spiritual and the earthly with such deftness that we on the outside see it as stillness and obedience to responsibility. I know that I'm not there yet. I'm not mature enough to appreciate this quiet elation unless I can put a frame on it and hang it in my mind like a picture in a gallery. I can see those pictures now; days at the beach humbled by the vastness of the ocean and its puniness in comparison to God, the heaven connected smile of my daughter as a young child, moments in the stillness of prayer when I knew that I had finally "got" it, afternoons in the Smoky Mountains when the boundary between land and sky melted, and an ordinary morning like this one.

This will pass, and I won't notice the passing until I know that something less sublime is there in its place. But now, right now ... ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.


awareness
gratitude