Unseen Beauty: A Journal

Captured Light

The fog rolled in this morning, softening the harsh edges of the landscape, smudging outlines with damp fingers, and blessing the world with the aura of the sunrise broken into a thousand droplets of luminescence. Behind me, the bustle of morning traffic and the hum of the heat exchanger were no more than abstracts, sounds without the visibility to make them tangible.

I climbed the stairs, the fog fading in the familiar embrace of concrete and steel. The heat exchanger for our building is still broken, so I shivered my way into my office and sat for a moment, staring at the familiar desktop of my computer and waiting for inspiration, motivation, or naptime, whichever arrived first.

Outside the windows, the sun broke free of the horizon, rising over the dense blockade of live oaks and scrub brush to take its rightful place in the pale blue bowl of the winter sky. I wandered across the rug to the eastern-facing windows, hoping that the touch of the sun would clear the fog from my brain with some degree of the efficiency with which it was clearing it from the landscape outside the glass. Propping my shoulder against the wall, I squinted through the blinds.

The tree outside the window long ago lost its leaves, shedding its greenery in its annual sacrifice to the touch of winter in hopes that spring would bring it even greater bounty, a reward for the long months of stark emptiness. The white branches have bobbed outside the glass for three months now, pale fingers against the green and brown of the landscape in the background. But on this morning, the tree was clothed again in a sparkle of light. The morning mist had touched the its branches, and at the tip of each was a single drop of moisture that caught the morning sun, glowing with light.

The sun climbed with the explosive energy characteristic of its Floridian incarnation, and as it inched further above the tree line, the tree glowed stronger, capturing more and more of the light in the tiny gems of water that tipped its branches, turning them into diamonds. Even stripped of all the usual ornaments, even here, I had to remember to take the gifts of beauty given…and to glow.