It is 75 degrees and cloudy-gray. Inside, my air-conditioning perpetuates an illusion of December, but there is no wood smoke coming through window cracks the way it does when the temperature drops here. I crave the sun; this is our third day of gray.
The fluctuating barometric pressure makes it difficult to settle down and do anything organized. I’m living Friday re-runs and I’ve got spring fever. Without spring. I’m chasing myself in circles.
So I choose the unproductivity for now. I’m puttering. I’m listening.
When the world is swaddled in gray, I have to look harder to find photos. I don’t commit to much. I shoot simply, open my shutter as wide as I can, use my iPhone to keep processing simple. I want to make something beautiful; I miss the light.
Yet I have looked more – SEEN more – because I can’t see as much. It has made me desperate to live, to breathe, so that when the wind and the river pulled me five different directions with the rain and small-speckled my windshield to catch white-lit sky, I felt my eyes open, and my heart, even without the light I was chasing.
I curl up with Squiggy in my new chair, smelling the earth on him after he had been out planting a “garden” with Pip. I join Pete while he folds the laundry. I barely have energy to fold hand towels. The kids need a break from their routine. We put them in the bathtub, go to our room, learn how to kiss again. Learn how to want more again.
Fall, winter, cloudy days – they incubate us, prepare us for the spring, for renewal. There is nothing easy about the death and the gray, but the life we find in it and after it means so much more than it did. I think the world races to the endings – semesters, quarters, years, deadlines, finish lines – but I forget how to do that right now, living real and full on grace, when every single day is a beginning.
I think I live outside of time; I am Holiday Gray on spring-like days. Here the veil between the eternal and the physical thins – to let the ghosts in, to open the darkness and reveal the greatest Light.
SHARE:
Love this. And understand it so well. Tired of the gloomy data here also. Thanks for sharing your beautiful heart.
Amy Nabors recently posted..A Year of Eucharisteo
I’ve loved your posts lately. There is something different about them – honest and beautiful as always, but also more real and restful, like you aren’t trying so hard to make things work perfectly. I hope it’s okay that I say this. Thank you for sharing your journey here.
Lee Ann recently posted..Regretting the Summer Palaces
Kelly, this is stunning–like poetry.
Megan Willome recently posted..The 13 Days of Christmas