Daylight

"Hover over our darkness and depths. Create us once again.
Create us anew O God. Create us not novel, but new."

I saw my parent's room with new eyes as sunlight flooded the space and the golden walls hung with large-brimmed hats glowed with the light of morning. I wondered if a room of sheltered light would hinder adaptation to the outside world. Through many years I'd preferably stay inside where ugliness couldn't touch me. I admittedly still long for empyreal escape but I know not by which measure it's mine to demand. As a child at my friend's backyard lake where we held bare feet over still water, we dared each other to walk on the surface as Jesus once did. "If we but had faith the size of a mustard seed" we echoed "we could walk on water." We stood poised for motion on the wooden dock and looked down in to the muddy depths where we knew slimy black seaweed and silt awaited us if we sunk. Neither counting off or reckless abandon drove us to hurl ourselves off the dock. We'd eventually draw back our dirty feet and climb up to the house where the demands on faith and trust weren't so portentously held in our hands.

I've climbed two rock faces alone, without ropes in the wild where no one was there to see my ascent or my jubilant arrival at the top. Any fear of falling was kept in check by the anonymity of my endeavour and the knowledge that any pain or triumph was mine alone. Far from self-satisfied as I surveyed the landscape below, all I could say was, "It's just me, its just me." It felt incomplete to not share the sunlight or quiet woods, or the morning sky from a greyhound bus or smile together at the German family that fed their kids crackers and poked their curious faces above their seats. How many thoughts and memories do we keep contained within ourselves alone? This summer Tonya found an onion that had rolled beneath our mammoth kitchen stove, and we set it in the windowsill to let it recover under the long day's light. In its final hour we let the sunlight seep in before we buried it back in the ground. I was glad to be with someone who found this not hockie but sane. If we shed light on the small and the trivial, how much more exigent it seems to bare ourselves.