It’s hard to find beauty right now. Outside, patches of slush cover dead glass. The air is raw and the pavement is slick with rain. Inside feels just as gloomy. Life has retreated behind glass and masks — both literal and figurative — not only because of the deadly pandemic but also because of political unrest.
The beauty of winter has so far evaded us. Instead, we remain in a weird in-between state — like nature’s purgatory — neither here nor there.
But as the days drag on like weeks, I find myself, despite it all, venturing into the cold for afternoon or evening jogs, searching for something, anything, uplifting. And, inevitably, no matter my mood, I find peace.
Today, I noticed an interesting knot on an oak tree with a hole drilled through its center, perhaps by a small creature; a berry bush that stood out red against a dreary backdrop of gray; the shape of a conifer against a bleak sky; a puddle on the sidewalk.
I should note that I didn’t exactly notice the puddle itself; rather, my eye caught the way in which it reflected the sky.
Heaven meeting Earth.
In his famous book, “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau (a favorite author of mine, by the way) also noticed this divine connection.
In-between rain storms, Thoreau writes that Walden Pond is “never smoother than at such a time; and the clear portion of the air above it being shallow and darkened by clouds, the water, full of light and reflections, becomes a lower heaven itself so much the more important.”
Thoreau, a transcendentalist, believed that heaven existed here on Earth — in nature. Easy for him to say; he wrote “Walden” while more or less intentionally cutting himself off from normal everyday human interactions (although he didn’t ‘rough it’ on his own as he claims in the book, but that’s a topic for another column).
At times like these, when the social fabric is rending at its seams, it’s hard to subscribe to Thoreau’s way of thinking. And yet, I can attest that the divine is here. For a minute, while barreling down a side street trying to catch my breath, I caught a glimpse of it — at first glance, a mundane puddle on the sidewalk; on closer inspection, a window into heaven.
Andy Castillo is features editor at the Greenfield Recorder. He can be reached at acastillo@recorder.com.