The Kindest of Lights

It was that time of morning when a four inch rock casts a four inch shadow, when the world is not quite in gear for the day. However, on that September morning, there was still time to notice the small rust-colored rock on the low wall. Soon the full light of day would reduce it to insignificance.

Full daylight is relentless and unkind in southern New Mexico, obliterating the smallest of details with its excess of white light. Two short spans just after the sun peeks over Sommerford Mountain in the east and before it slides behind Magdelena Peak in the west are reliable moments of kind and gracious light.

Those are the times when the smallest details of the natural order are revealed in their beauty and importance: a spider’s tightrope on a single leaf, a prickly pear pad and a hummingbird basking in the light’s first warmth, the sharp shadows on a normally smooth slope, the imprint of a dove on a window and the feathers on the ground, a caravan of ants hauling fragments of bread crumbs, and a mouse’s stockpile of tiny bird seeds under a leaf.

As the first phrasing about the rock and its shadow formed in my mind, it sounded like the opening scene of a murder mystery. There should be a violent crime committed in stark contrast to the singular calm and beauty of one rock’s shadow. I had no such story to tell, but somewhere in the world, the country, the state, the county, a multitude of violent events, both criminal and natural, occurred with complete disregard of a small rock’s shadow and my privilege to observe it.

When I feel a twinge of guilt at my creature comforts in contrast to the horrific suffering in the world, I wonder if and hope that perhaps those of us living quiet ordinary lives can provide some balance in a world unduly weighted toward pain. I imagine my small rock and its shadow seated securely on one end of a child’s teeter-totter while a tsunami engulfs the other end and all the other rocks on the playground. Somehow, because I see and enjoy it, my little rock keeps its shadow.

Pure fancy! My little rock has no effect on the tsunami of 2004, hurricane Katrina or Rita, or the next one coming, or the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and torn apart. While my early morning calm and joy in no way assuage the pain and suffering reported on the news, I still believe both are important.

If no one notices the strength in small details, surely large and overwhelming crises, panic, pain and despair will become our only reality. I find myself grounded and hopeful by the small beauties revealed in the early morning and late afternoon light. The smallest of joys can change and strengthen, or at least balance the world. This I believe.