Out My Window

When I was small and the day was too big for me, I’d often find myself looking out my bedroom window. The room was small enough to hold me. The view was broad enough to give me space.

Staring out my bedroom window on a winter night, I’d see down the hillside beside my house, across the back field—white and sparkling stiff with snow. My eyes would trace the starlight up the bank to the river where the hockey players had smoothed the ice to a finish like glass. Even from my room, I’d know that I could see my face reflected in it. The surface was marble under the satin sky so black that it had turned back to blue.

Sitting at my window staring at three football fields of shimmering white with tiny sparkling crystals and that river of black ice so smooth, I knew on some nights that the Earth was outshining the stars. The pure silence and the beauty of it were enough to make this child feel her small bedroom was a church. If eyes could know things in their deepest meaning, mine surely were wise on those winter nights.

It's no wonder that understanding is called illumination. Nor is it a wonder that monks spent years painting illuminations of individual letters in one bible.

My eyes would feast with the pleasure of seeing so much perfect snow with not a foot print. Next to godliness I think the phrase is, but I hardly knew that then. The snow, the magic marble river, the stars in the blue-black sky, the trees—my eyes had so much to see. I was dazzled by the brightness in the darkness. It was all I could do to look and enjoy—to appreciate and be.

For the longest time . . . without moving . . . I would be completely taken by my seeing—engaged, enchanted, unaware of even breathing, fully alive.

Being without thinking is heavenly.

—me strauss Letting me be