Pictures Later

Today . . . today, today, today. This week. Hmm.

First ah-ha moment. Moreover, first, I-told-you-so moment. I went with a friend out for coffee and conversation. We headed out to Westside Coffee, which led us to West Cliff Drive, where we found a bench and sat and chatted and oohed and ahhed over the ocean and the sky. The sky was filled with varying clouds, cracking open occassionally to stream light down onto a silvery, choppy ocean that would glow golden with the peaking sun. The rain from which we received respite that day had lit the cliff tops and slopes electric shades of green and cleaned the air--we could see the towers at Moss Landing and the hills rising up behind Salinas and Castroville. We interrupted ourselves and eachother with oohs and moments of necessary basking and blathering as the sun broke through over our bench and commentaries on the beauty and oh look! a dolphin! and we ran further out onto the cliff to stand and point and become ever so much more excited each time the dolphin or its playmates resurfaced. Driving away from West Cliff, there ahead rose the Santa Cruz mountains, dripping, absolutely dripping with deep green trees. Not slopes, not inclines, but mountains. Not Shasta or the Sierra Nevada Range, but mountains. And then descending into the valley, down Graham Hill Road, with trees leaning, light streaming, a road cut in between descending hills . . . I was not wrong to feel helpless in attempting to convey a piece of this to my classmates in CAS 101, it is not comparable to anything anywhere I have ever seen, I was not idealizing it, painting it rosy in my mind to stab my heart. No. It is that beautiful, indescribable, irreplaceable.

Second ah-ha. The sky. Today was an all day in San Jose day. San Joe-zee. (I'm kidding if you, reader deary, don't speak Spanish or are not native to this area--'tis San Ho-say.) And a long while at the car dealership, where I plopped down on a strip of grass, layed on my back, and stared at the sky. Wow. Yup, wow.

It is not that the sky is a place of infrequent visual perusal, but rather that its importance just registered. It was so still. It was blue and puffed with clouds but still. Later, it acquired cloud streaks of a drying brush and feathered clouds and soon a river of watermarked clouds flowed through the center of my field of vision, behind the original sedentary clouds. The sky is like the ocean. It is always there, but it is always different. It is changeable, unreliable in form, but reliable in existance. It would be heart breaking, it is heart breaking, to see it polluted and unhealthy. And I rely on its existance. The sky does not replace the ocean for me; the ocean has branded a lodging for itself upon my heart where only it will ever fit. So I live with its absence in Grand Rapids. But in Grand Rapids, the sky took hold in a way it never had. Here the sky is big. Here it can blend with the ocean, expand into the ocean, be sawed by trees or mountains. Here it is dark at night, lit by its own stars. In Grand Rapids the stars are not so available, but the sky moves. The clouds are more and more variable. The sunrises and sunsets have a dynamism unlike those here--for while they set along flat horizons and softer, rounder, smaller trees, they set with an expansiveness that shrinks one down to the reality of one's smallness the way the ocean can. They set in a dancing, painted sky of immense proportions. The sky, the sky is necessary.

Third ah-ha. Driving back from San Jose, over 17 by myself in the van. KRTY playing, as I swung up and down the curves through the mountains, George Strait's "I Saw God Today." Maybe it is a cheesy song. Maybe I am "cute-sy" as a roommate stated this semester.
"Just walked down the street to the coffee shop, I had to take a break, I'd been by her side for 18 hours straight. Saw a flower growing in the middle of the side walk, pushing up through the concrete, like it was planted right there for me to see. The flashing lights, the honking horns all seemed to fade away, in the shadow of that hospital, at 5:08, I saw God today. I've been to Church, I've read the book, I know he's here but I don't look near as often as I should. His fingerprints are everywhere, I just slowed down to stop and stare, opened my eyes and man I swear, I saw God today."
I haven't read the book, I won't comment any further on my unorthodox status of haves and have not's and do's and do not's, but I will say this much: those moments of finding a flower in the sidewalk are the most overwhelming moments of ah-ha. How else would the sky be noted in San Jose and Grand Rapids and be found to be so compelling?