A winters morning

It was one of those golden moments, unplanned and unanticipated.

Sunday morning, lying on the window seat in my bedroom, with a friend, talking. I found myself relaxed and satisfied with my life.

Gone was the typical nagging worry about things that needed to be done, or all the places I needed to be.

It was quiet except for the music softly wafting from the CD playing gently on the stereo.

As he dozed off, I could feel the solid rhythm of his heartbeat against my warm ear. As I glanced out the window, my field of vision was filled with the vivid, gleaming day, as the sun reached its peak of spectacular beauty. Icy reflections etched the stark trees into vivid relief against another days morning sky. A slight soft winters whispered snow fell like quiet cotton on flannel earth. A few solitary oak leaves performed their final, fluttering death dances to the ground as they gave way silently to winters quiet embrace. The evergreens shivered under white and seemed to huddle together like tall children waiting for the morning bus.








In that moment, I was seized with an overwhelming sense of spiritual fulfillment.

And then it was gone, lost as soon as I became conscious of my transfixed reverie.

It was like when you wake up from a pleasant dream and try to make yourself roll back into sleep. The mere act of trying makes it impossible for you to go back to where you were.

He was still sleeping, the music played and the snow continued to fall, but I couldn't rediscover the nirvana I had just experienced.

Looking back on the moment reminded me just how rare times like those really are and how much of our daily life is wasted with worry and struggle and commitment.

Being...

It takes the occasional golden moment to put these seemingly important day-to-day concerns in the proper perspective.

There were a dozen other things I shoulda-coulda been doing that Sunday morning.

The warm laundry could have been folded, the tussled bed could have been made, but then I would have lost the opportunity to feel, if only briefly, a blissful appreciation of the true blessings of life.

True friendship, life, peace...living without any shadows to mar innocence.

It may be overstatement to say that that singular moment has profoundly changed me. I don't know. Maybe next week I'll be back to my energetic, tense at times self.

But I do know that since then I seem to have developed a greater interest in slowing down. I have felt less anxious about tasks left undone and more concerned with watching clouds and sharing smiles my true friends.

And I can't help but regret how much time I've wasted not wasting time starting out windows and sharing a tender moments with some of the greatest gifts I've ever been fortunate enough to receive.

Life moves us all and someday the times we share with those we love will change or be gone, but the memory of that moment we shared on a lazy Sunday morning in December will be with me forever.