I want to tell you about a cloud and the day the sky became the inside of an oyster shell. How the sun rose all the way to that high place it’s officially day, not as a firey ball, but as a shimmering while pearl. The whole time the air soft, the entire dome of the sky subtle washes of color and pristine mother-of-pearl. The awe in this everyday eye-view of an oyster’s, how beautiful it is.

I’d spent a week focused on clouds. My head rocked back as I circled in place whenever outdoors. Billowy clouds. Clouds changing color thru pinks, orange-golds, brilliant whites. Clouds that flickered with lightning. Clouds layered like torn gauzes and silks. Small dark ships of clouds, flotillas sailing swiftly over the bay.  On an everyday sort of morning, I looked up to pink tubular trails traced toward the water. Fat trails, uniform, round. As I approached the bayshore park lawn, color blazed through the trees. I didn’t see it was no ordinary dawn until I stood at water’s edge, saw the side-to-side wavy form of a funnel rise from a singular point on the far flat horizon. Spread into a broad orange and gold fan of swirls, folds, and lights filling half the sky. At the top long fingers stretched as feathers that wisped and dissolved to gather again as the trails I followed down. The cloud shifted and changed, darkened and lightened, fascinated for nearly an hour. The point of it’s origin and the stem it grew from intact. Once evenly spaced parallel lines like shark’s gills grew across one side. Another time it turned into an invisible dancer’s skirt. And as daylight approached, it melted, puddled, stretched into a plane of peachy pinks and pearlescence. Like a conch shell, we said. And as the shimmering white pearl of the sun crested and rose, the colors and sky softened, lightened, changed to the inside of an oyster shell. We were inside the shell of the sky’s dome, like oysters, seeing what oysters see every day. It was so beautiful we were speechless. None of us had cameras. Words are so inadequate.

Since then I’ve had two dreams where I sit at a table with fresh, perfect, white vegetables. Last night white Japanese eggplant. Days ago bowls and piles of different varieties. All white. For years I’ve said I don’t want a milktoast life. But this is about so much more.

Transcendence comes through Connection. Can be hard and beautiful, both. Another’s story, another’s view, you sometimes don’t know ’til you’re in it. How many times have you been there?

Little girl, be careful what you say
when you make talk with words, words—
for words are made of syllables
and syllables, child, are made of air—
and air is so thin—air is the breath of God—
air is finer than fire or mist,
finer than water or moonlight,
finer than spider-webs in the moon,
finer than water-flowers in the morning:
and words are strong, too,
stronger than rocks or steel
stronger than potatoes, corn, fish, cattle,
and soft, too, soft as little pigeon eggs,
soft as the music of hummingbird wings.
So, little girl, when you speak greetings,
when you tell jokes, make wishes or prayers,
be careful, be careless, be careful,
be what you wish to be.
~ Carl Sandburg, Wind Song

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Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A writer’s life.
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In Memoriam: 6-17-2015
Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Tywanza Sanders
Cynthia Hurd
Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton
Myra Thompson
Ethel Lance
Rev. Daniel Simmons
Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor
Susie Jackson

There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
~ Leonard Cohen

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A year ago I discovered half-closed blossoms bigger than my hand covering a small tree, stunning flowers on plain, prehistoric looking cactus tendrils entwined through the branches. ‘Oh, the night blooming cereus opened last night,’ a woman behind me said. She took me to a large oak engulfed with similar vines, small nubs furred with what looked like coarse gray dog hair pocked along their length. I learned the nubs would stretch into thick reddish stems, push a large teardrop bud out at the ends. That I had to go to the tree the very night the buds plumped. Nothing prepared me for the miraculously beautiful sight of an entire tree draped, roots to the ends of its furthest limbs, in an abundance of 8” blooms. The white petals felt like feathers, the abundant yellow stamens baby-soft. I took pictures, vowed to remember, because the whole show played just once a year, at dark night. By 8am the blooms would close, drop their heads.

But I missed the night display this past week. Not because they came early, which they did, but because I forgot to feel the excitement of anticipation, head out in the late late night. I stood before the fading display the morning after, wondered at myself for finding the splendor in the waning blossoms less than when I first found them a year before. Wondered at thinking them not quite as fine as when they glowed wide-bright in the night. I even noted there weren’t as many on the tree this year, as if that lessened their magic. I’ve experienced peak perfection, I thought. And immediately saw what I was doing. I was dismissing this year’s grandeur with comparison, not appreciating the divine before me. These, no different in their life progression than the gorgeous sculptures of disintegrating tulips and insides of broken conchs, the rugged ocean battered beauty of aged shells that I love.

It wasn’t because I couldn’t possess their impermanence, either. For they’re no different than other beauty I can’t hold – changing light across the bay, the turning of trees through seasons, the birds and clouds. I realized I’d somehow projected my perfectionism for myself, my current angst of not in right time, not the right output, not good enough onto the stunning flowers that help us see their prehistoric looking host differently 364 days a year.

Three days later, the sun barely up, the sky spread flat, uninspiring, I left the bay earlier than usual to walk home. Halfway up the walk I turned, saw pink, pale yellow, the biggest.sun.ever over the water. And something otherworldly happened. I was transported to Wonderland.

Light shown with a difference reminiscent of New Mexico, what I imagine in Provence. Every street I looked down was a tunnel to somewhere shining at the end. Wherever I looked, color popped, was intensely 3-D against the hundred shades of green and brown around it. Lit lamps floated before buildings. Small white flowers hovered mid-air, glowing. Purple cloth, a pale lemon umbrella, hot pink chair danced in front of dirty white stucco. Daisies on thread stalks, brilliant yellow splats on a red-dirt colored wall. Subtleties were painterly, the brush strokes luscious. And sunlight cut through like timed spotlights, illuminated a patch of peach wall in the shadows, hot orange-red palm tassels overhead, and ahead, lit bright, the entire tall trunk of a tree covered with the limp drooping heads of night blooming cereus.

Rumi says the wound is the place where the Light enters you. I say sometimes it takes a gift like a trip thru Wonderland to open your eyes. Perfection’s everywhere, every moment. The big secret. . .we define it.

Tell me. . .you see that, too, don’t you?

*
The morning after
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Another journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writers Life.

A secret:  I really was in Wonderland.
A favorite:  Wonderland