Seeing What Is There

A long time ago, back in the Syracuse years, I knew a young graduate student from Louisiana who had just moved into an apartment with his soon-to-be bride. The building was located in such a way that the apartments on one side looked out onto the skyline of the city, and the others had views of the street below and a little pocket park.

Syracuse was certainly not noted for its skyline, but the city view was a colorful, cosmopolitan cluster of sparkling lights, and it conveyed a sense of sophistication and almost-glamour that my friend was craving, a sense of having arrived somewhere, whether or not that was true.

But as it turned out, he was not able to get a city-view apartment, and now we were standing by his window looking out onto bare trees and the park, which was quietly filling with snow.

"I didn't get the view I wanted," said my friend, "but I got the view I could handle."

He'd come to terms with it, understood its appeal, and saw its different beauty. It was like a lovely etching, a little poem of peace.

This odd little memory came back to me last night, or I should say this morning, when I forced myself up out of bed to go outside and see a red moon. There was supposed to be a lunar eclipse that would have this effect, and that's one thing about me: I will always climb out of bed to see something special in the sky.

Everything was bright, but I didn't see the moon. What I saw instead, because I was out there looking, was a shooting star. Just one, but it was glorious.

Then, back in the living room, moonlight's gift...patches of light on the carpet...luminous parallelograms, like portals to another world.

So I didn't see anything as exciting as a lunar eclipse or red moon, but I saw what was there.I remembered how night is its own transformation.

And I remembered to see beyond what I wish for, or rather what's in front of it.