It Was Just A Puddle

There’s something very comforting about the predictable expanse of sky in the desert. You see the weather coming and it does. There’s time to prepare if you want to – or not. Clouds drop to meet the earth like a white wash on the horizon and half hour or so later it’s drizzling lightly on your toes. A patch of blue provides a window for the sun to highlight textures of the mountain range and you can predict the small puddles on the porch will be dried up as the weather, invariably, approaches.

On this drizzly Thursday morning God speaks in rumbling distant thunder – a soft low voice speaking of serious things over coffee at the kitchen table before the children get up or in hopes that they won’t hear. There’s business that must be dealt with before the day starts and the work begins and this is our time alone to discuss things.

It’s precisely how I imagined it would be - everyone in my consciousness, some physically closer, some not. Cassie is here, but not here. She’s exactly in the place I envisioned. Her, waking up early and wandering out for a walk in the morning - myself thinking, writing. Her in her own world but very near – me in mine but near. In the dream she would enter and leave, always with excited and engaging thoughts to share.

The morning ambles on – Cassie returns. We read and talk, interrupting one another constantly with “listen to this!” A few paragraphs or recital from her book or the magazine I’m reading leads to a tangent of discourse and eventually fades to quiet again as we refocus until one or the other of us break the silence again.

As the morning passes into midday, the low measured talk with God becomes an argument – voice raised and thunderbolts returned. Lightening is deceptive. Our first instinct of interpretation of things may sometimes be all at once far too complex and simplistic. Lightening doesn’t come from the sky, it’s drawn from the sky by the ground. A force from within the earth beckons the energy in the sky, which comes down to meet it part way. It’s the earth, however, that speaks first.

“There was an exodus of birds from the trees because they didn’t know we were only pretending. The people all looked up and looked pleased, while the birds flew around like the whole world was ending.” – Ani DiFranco

It wasn’t the kind of argument that leaves me feeling in conflict. Maybe that’s merely because I wasn’t taking it seriously enough, wasn’t listening carefully – perhaps if I were I’d believe things weren’t right with the world and there’s a great deal more conflict I have with God that’s needing resolve. Instead, be it delusion or divine clarity, I take it as an inspired oration on the order of things or welcome instruction on watercolor – a simple fact that didn’t go unnoticed or unlearned that lead, ultimately, to my enrichment.

The sun leaks out from time to time from rips in the desert cloud cover. A puddle of water gathered on the plastic lawn furniture forms an organic mirror filled half with sky and half with building. Looking at it long enough I’m left with the impression that it might be a window into another world when in fact it’s merely a small reflection of the one I’m in. One that the dry desert air will likely swallow up before the evening – making it no less than what it was but gone nonetheless.

It’s perhaps what’s all at once right and wrong with the way we look at ourselves. Seeking epiphanies like organic reflecting pools and believing that we’re looking at the “real thing.” When the moment is over and nature has dried up our looking glass, we’re left with a lingering feeling that something large and immutable happened when in fact we were simply knocked off balance because we “paid attention” for a moment. It was just a puddle.