light

I drove home from Junction City under a cloud-bowl sky. Grayness ceased just before the panorama of encircling hills. Sunset had turned the background powderish pink. Each landscape rise stood darkly defined, tallest ones patched with snow.

In the middle of highway 99 I stopped, pulled out my wide angle lens camera, and carried on in click heaven, traffic piling up behind me.

Well, no.

I only wished I could have. Wished I had the equipment, spot, and time. Never mind, though -- dazzle me it did, in the gifting way that life accessorizes.

It is a dark existence, this. Maybe my melancholy makes it seem so, but as I've been reminded lately by friends who can't believe in a personal God who would allow horrors and tragedies, there's a cloud of historical witness to the awful. It continues all around us, a present reminder. The more I learn, the worse it gets. Even such beauty beneath the gray bowl can't make up for it, can't make it not so.

I used to try and look at a contrary scene -- everything's really all right, I'm just peering in the wrong places, this is happening so I'll be that much more happy next time, next year. I think I strove against reality. Some days the pink was nowhere. Long times passed between light and glimmer. They still do. And there's a big perhaps that I'll reach a point where gloom settles completely.

Here I am, old, and thinking these things. Yet
I remain captivated by the tiniest pinprick.

As if it were on purpose.

As if darkness has its place.

I keep longing for more of the journey and the promise and the next bright bits of surprise.