Today I’m recycling a picture. I took it in April two years ago, at the Lincoln Children’s Zoo in Lincoln, Nebraska. We were there with our kids, giving them a chance to run around and take a break from an emotional visit with my grandma, who was dying. I have written before about how strongly I felt that we were in a place between worlds during that time, driving between our home and hers, moving between normal life and life-out-of-time. Facing death while the world around us was quietly exploding into life.
This white peacock struck me at the time as other-worldly, even though it was exactly something of this world. In the midst of hurt and loss, here was beauty—silent, arresting, sacred.
How much of what surrounds us is like that. The fact that anything you set your eyes on, or touch, or hear, can speak to you of something else—the fact that everything can whisper or cry out as a metaphor for something else—it is all at once soothing and heart-rending.
I wonder about myself that I think that could sound cliché.
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This wordless project was at least partly an exercise in faith. Faith that I really could find something to share each day. Faith that anybody would care in the least. Faith that I would find anything to say at the end of it.
Faith, too, that finding pockets of beauty in a fallen world is not a trite exercise in denial but rather a flying into the face of darkness with complete and utter defiance.
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I arrived at a grocery store once just as a person was being wheeled out on a stretcher. We passed each other in a matter of seconds—one of those things that is over before you realize what is happening. I didn’t see even if it was a man or woman, but was left only with the impression of motionlessness and gray skin. Inside, in the produce section, there was a freshly-mopped section of floor. Whatever happened there was quickly becoming invisible. And it struck me that maybe there is not even an inch of ground that we walk on all day that has not at some point in history seen the struggle between life and death.
And we go through life having no idea, most of the time, what scars we are touching.
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And still the truly beautiful never ceases to be beautiful, and light never stops being light, if we can bear to keep our eyes open.
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Thank you for continuing to stop by here. My readers are a small group, and I wondered if it was a mistake to do this project—if it was tiresome or silly or who knows what. I worried. I needed time to be quiet, but I did not want to stop speaking or reaching out, and this was all I could think to do. I appreciate knowing you were listening.
Happy Easter to you.
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