I tend to see life where people are absent.
Just this afternoon I was driving down a narrow, forest-ridden winding road. With each turn came a new landscape. One bend brought a small shed, weathered with rain and snow and simply time. The next curve forced me to look across the road to a brook slithering under a wooden bridge, both coming from and leading to nowhere at all.
I steal quick glances. In this moment, they’re mine.
Today’s forecast promised grey skies.
Don’t you love when nature proves us mere guessing humans wrong?
The trees that line this road are tall, towering high above the ground and create a canopy overhead. Both sides are steep hills that become small mountains. This road a disturbance, a misfit with its home on the ground.
I glance up to the houses sitting triumphantly at the mountaintop. Pure sunshine trickles in through the cracks in the canopy, places where the trees tried and tried to reach each other but fell short. The beams of light are misshapen. Sunshine spills out where it can, maneuvering its way to the ground. On the woodchips and scattered tree branches. On the fallen logs and wild flowers and puddles of water leftover from yesterday’s storm.
It is in these moments that I see life, and I’m not sure why.
All I know is that I see, I feel, and then, I know.
There is something captivating about watching nature in an undisturbed state. The light’s ability to find its way all on its own. The way the silent hum of the engine beneath my seat falls deep into the background as I take it all in. A world on mute. I can’t hear my breath. I must be holding it, hiding it, but from what? Maybe it was taken. Nature, a thief.
I see beams, literal beams of light. They’re falling and yet they’re rising. An illusion, a comfort.
I trace the beams back to their source. Where did these pillars of magic come from? How can I see the shape of light? I feel special. Strong almost. Seeing beams is my special power. There is life in this light.
This sunshine. This light. It’s resilient, it’s present, and it’s certainly alive. It’s in this moment I long to be barefoot in the midst of it all, briefly considering pulling the car over, leaving the pieces of metal and rubber behind, chasing the swelling need to feel dirt beneath my feet.
Why is it that we don’t consider light alive?
This drive down this road was fleeting. Two minutes at most. And somehow, that was all I needed. To know.
The presence of this light was so strong. It chose its words carefully, speaking in feelings rather than words. Taking in the light as it hit the forest at every angle, in every possible area, I saw life. Undisturbed, allowed to live, to be. To not be expecting the light only to catch it radiating strongest as its heads toward sleep. Sunset.
There is no life in sight to disturb the beams. An absence of life, a void somehow filled with life itself. Life is mysterious. Where did this light come from, how will it return? Life is intoxicating. These beams, this warmth, it floods me with a rush of awe. Life is illuminating.
A winding road, a two-minute drive. Taken for granted all too often. A light show hides within the outskirts, in the places we’re not supposed to look. Eyes ahead, on the road. But brief glance to the hills, a visual climb up the mountainside. Where the people are not. That is where I see life.
Illuminating.
