Moving on Down the Line

Nora woke at 4:45 this morning, and I was tired and cranky.  We still stay at Mom's on Wednesday nights.  We've done this for a few years now as Mom watches Nora on Tuesdays and Thursdays while I'm at school.  Between preschool and Mom's and work, I'm a regular commuter down 34.  For those of you who don't live here, 34 is a two-lane highway that runs east to west and stitches many of the tiny towns (and a few of the bigger ones) together with asphalt fabric held together by the white painted thread of the center line.   The majority of vehicles are called to farm work--semis hauling beans or corn, trucks pulling anhydrous tanks to the fields, the occasional tractor crawling close to the median.

I've come to love this drive, especially in the mornings when the sun is rising and I can talk to God about where I'm headed and where He'd like me to go.

And there was this today:  that beauty of the sun splitting the clouds, driving straight into the dark ground, those silken curtains parting and outlined.  And I'm forgetting myself and this is such a relief.  I have been looking forward to this summer break so I might be still, be quiet, and move closer into this beauty, that tactile, secret place where I forget myself, dissolved and stronger as I become the passageway between God's beautiful, speechless things and myself, the instrument made to receive them, a gift.

Kneeling in the garden or in front of the screen door at night as the wind speaks hush into the house or the stars tell me how small and perfect we are or the bird call or the creaking cedar whose arthritic bark aches in strong winds, the crabapple tree blossoms and bursts so I might look through them as one would the stained glass of a cathedral.  And, oh Lord, how I long to release what I've found to pick up and carry over the last few months in that impossibly strong and silent peace doing something where I am not always hearing myself talk but for what my hands find to say in their doing.