Yesterday after kissing my husband goodbye and sitting for an hour at a New York airport, I was finally airborne after an uneventful take-off in a soft mist of intermittent snow. The backdrop of our flight's ascension was ashen and chilly, a world struggling to thaw from beneath a deep frost.
As we climbed, we sat in darkness, save for a solitary reading lamp lit somewhere towards the back. Outside our windows was nothing but gray, inside a quiet darkness. We crept with a low rumble through a wet blanket swirling slightly around our intruding form. Ensconced in our dark cocoon, the sudden visibility of light was as an immediate warmth to our eyes.
Our path cut through the clouds and broke above them into the clearest blue sky I've ever seen. Unmarred by skylines or rising polluted smog, was a tapestry of truest blue as far as the eye could see, capped with a fierce blush-fringed fire orange. And with it all, light, glorious light bursting forth from an atmosphere of gloom. I slid across the empty seat between me and the window and with elbows resting on it's narrow sill, I drank in the light and imagined I could feel it's glow on my face.
Today I greeted my loved one, himself only days ago immersed in a darkness so intense and so consuming that he could not see any light. He heard it spoken of with hope of those who yet believed and it waited quietly deep within, his eternal promise that he would never be left on his own. Yet he could not see it, could not feel it's warmth within his heart, nor perceive it's brilliance shining over his life.
This morning I was enveloped in arms that were warm and met with eyes that shone with a resplendent internal illumination. Though the enemy raged and had come to seek and destroy the fire inside and though it had been only days after a thick enveloping mist had fallen, there before me was a man who had broken through a momentary fog and is beginning to catch again a glimpse of a beautiful light, fringed in fire and beauty created just for him. This is his third beginning and like many others in his life, I am watching with elbows resting on the window to his life as our Maestro orchestrates the first movement of a sensational tango of light overtaking and subduing the darkness...
