Unseen Beauty: A Journal

Safety

I’m proud to consider myself a Florida girl. It’s true that I am not from around here, and it’s true that I really hated it here when I first arrived. But over the eyars, this new place has become my home in a very real way. It’s given me a second life; it’s brought me love; and it’s shown me more magic than I would ever have believed possible in the scraggly landscape that I first saw when I came here.

But we all carry habits and traditions with us, activities born of experience and memory so vivid that words do not contain them. My memories of the blinding chill of blizzards and ice storms, of bouncing across the beautiful white-wrapped world in the wake of a 4-wheeler, of spinning madly on an inner tube at what seemed to be the edge of the world are still close to me. They ignore the span of years to come crowding at my call. And in their wake comes the warm glow of home at the end of the ride – of dry clothes and warm feet and of the comfort of looking out frosted windows at the cold world kept safely at bay.

Even in college, when I lived at the farm house, a mile from nowhere, it gave me great pleasure to look out the double-paned windows at the bay window at the front of the house, tea in my hand, and feel the warm wash of security knowing the cod and the ice was out there, and I was safe and warm.

We don’t have snow in Florida. We have rain and wind. And the electric sense of security that charges the air upon their arrival is as potent as the wake of any blizzard or the ice storm. They bring out that same need for security, for warmth, and for certainty.

Outside the concrete block of my little home, Alberto is making the world glisten – the grey sky weeping with the advent of the season’s first tropical storm. The rain is quiet now, but less than an hour ago, it was whipping against the glass with angry force – sounding more like hail than rain. And my reaction rises from my past – I make tea, open the blinds, and curl up to watch the fury of the sky and to reassure myself that there is still safety.

Most folks with a sense of self awareness spend their spare moments looking for something special. We look at the world and see what it is – a place of wonder and magic – a miraculous interconnected miracle that with millennia of great minds and centuries of great science, we have not yet begun to comprehend. We glory in that magic and that magnitude. But even as we appreciate the wonder, we need the security of knowing that the greater universe will not swallow us whole, that we will not be lost in something so great that it overwhelms us.

It seems a contradiction – me, the one who always searches for, longs for the magic – I want to sit here under my patchwork quilt and watch the rain. How can I call myself a creator? Do I not want to venture out and feel the charge in the air? Perhaps later, but for now, I am content. I love to touch the wild magic of God’s world, but I do not wish to let it consume me, for if it does, I may no longer echo the creation, for I am then no longer able to touch both worlds.

So, for now, I watch the chaos and the power outside my windows and am grateful, both for the power unleashed and for the opportunity to know that, in spite of the wild magic, there is still security to be found.