On Grace

The other night I pulled off the kinesio tape that had been supporting my elbow and paused. I looked down and saw, a beautiful deep pink rose on the side of the bath. A moment of transfiguration illuminating the ordinary, lifting my spirit, bathing me in an exquisite appreciation of the humdrum.

These are the moments that have sustained me. These perfect, tiny pearls of life in which everything contained in a moment coalesces for a fraction of time into a perfected whole. And these aren't the moments where one would typically expect to find transcendence. They are always the ordinary moments, the dirty, mixed up jumbled, complicated moments. They aren't about the moments themselves, nor what's in them but rather the fleeting holistic orientation of my entire mind-body-spirit awareness into something that perceives; beauty, truth, wonder.

I have entered these moments in the depths of despair, mine and that of others. I have been surprised by them in the most unexpected of worldly locations. I have found them at the end of endless days of challenge and frustration. And in the fleeting, sensing, feeling, knowing, perfection of such a moment there are no words, just awareness. But later, looking back, seeking to name or describe that gestalt, the only word that will come is Grace.