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Night Light

Not twice this day.
Inch time foot gem.
This day will not come again.
Each minute is worth a priceless gem.

Takuan

Stepping outside after the soft shawled fall of first dark.  Lost leaves shrugged off the beech and the Japanese maple scatter rose and gold patches that glimmer on the damp pebbled walk brushed with soft light from the porch. I turn west along the crackled sidewalk towards the corner and glide into the slim shadows of the cedars. As I glance up Beyond their edges night rises and blooms around me. There, behind the nimbus of mist haloed around the streetlight, the new moon rises tilted like some supplicating palm against the darkening last faint line of the day far away.

Above the arc of the new moon, I see, faintly, the orb of the Earth’s shadow dark against dark. I’m out on a short small errand for a quart of milk at the corner store. Only a few seconds, only sixty-five steps in the night when going either to or from. Here I am subsumed in the dark and lashed to the planet. You are here too. Here we all are rolling through one more day here on the Earth turning before the sun, here for one more cycle of the moon turning around the Earth, in and out of the shadow obscuring and then revealing and the again obscuring its face, here for one of twelve lunar cycles that add up to one more cycle of the Earth around its home star sliding turning and turning an endless gyre towards Lyra.

You say you don’t believe in Grace, in Miracles? Walk with me on my path so that we are three. Take those sixty-five steps to the corner store in the glow of the Night Light. Take it slow.

Open your eyes. Open all your eyes. Look outside — look beyond — yourself.

Behold.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • jwm May 13, 2022, 4:03 PM

    Thank you.

    JWM

  • Gnawbone Jack May 13, 2022, 4:37 PM

    Ditto

  • ThisIsNotNutella May 13, 2022, 4:40 PM

    File under Greatest Ally:

    Watch: Shireen Abu Akleh: Israeli forces beat mourners at funeral procession for slain Al Jazeera reporter
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/05/13/shireen-abu-akleh-violence-erupts-funeral-al-jazeera-journalist/

    But, but, but… Muh Islamofascism! Muh fliers of 747s into Campus Hillels! The humanity! Not to mention something about the Country Clubs. Or something.

    The woman appears to have been a Roman Catholic Towel Head Islamofascist.

    In other news, Putin is Insane, the Russians are Losing, Oceans are Rising, and that thing about War with East Asia.

    Clown World.

    • Vanderleun May 13, 2022, 6:52 PM

      What, pray tell, does all that have to do with this?

      • SoylentGreen May 14, 2022, 4:00 AM

        I think he read it off a Dr. Bronner’s bottle.

        • gwbnyc May 14, 2022, 5:48 PM

          look man, that’s close to blasphemy.

          I mean, jeez, not the peppermint at least, right?

      • jiminalaska May 14, 2022, 9:50 AM

        I’d skipped over thisisnotnutila, so maybe it’s Vegamite’s post but your query as to it’s pertinence prompted me to go back and follow his link to the Telegraph which told me “Start your free one-month trial to unlock this article”.

        Guess I’ll never know.

  • Mitchell Strand May 13, 2022, 5:38 PM

    Magnificent.

  • Randall Bridges May 13, 2022, 8:44 PM

    Thankfulness pulled from deep inside; expressive of appreciation for being. Thank you.

  • SoylentGreen May 14, 2022, 4:06 AM

    Wonderful – and definitely non-solipsistic (which is a Japanese cultural trait as I have observed).

  • Denny May 14, 2022, 4:22 AM

    Thank you Gerard, – a beautiful way to seize the day.

  • Uno Meeh May 14, 2022, 4:52 AM

    The Lord’s is the Earth, and its fulness,
    the world and all its peoples.
    It is He who set it on the seas;
    on the waters He made it firm.
    Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord?
    Who shall stand in His holy place?
    The man with clean hands and pure heart,
    who desires not worthless things,
    who has not sworn so as to deceive his neighbor.
    Such are the men who seek Him,
    seek the Face of the God of Jacob.
    Psalm 24

  • Mary Ann May 14, 2022, 6:01 AM

    Thank you.

  • RevBroGenerik May 14, 2022, 6:10 AM

    Turns out we’re not actually circling the Sun, rather, we’re in a spiral trailing behind it as we all whizz through space. This adds mightily to the whole Grandeur of the Creator’s Magnificence. Solar System orbits are so last century. Glory to GOD and Nature’s God.

  • Terry May 14, 2022, 7:45 PM

    Thank you for that beautiful few minutes.

  • AbigailAdams May 15, 2022, 6:30 PM

    I heard the Left’s condition put this way: They want the love without the truth; without the truth of the Gospels and the truth of Jesus Christ.

    If ever there was a a time when onlookers could observe the stark and real delineation between good and evil and come to the realization that God exists, it is now.