Encountering

Running across this blog's banner is a quotation from one of my favorite writer/teachers, Ken Macrorie: "People who daily expect to encounter fabulous realities run smack into them again and again. They keep their minds open for their eyes."

Yesterday, after my vet visit, still teary from watching life drain from Lucy's eyes, I turned the gentle curve out of Cowan onto the Winchester Highway. Before me, one long diagonal dash of yellow sunlight raced upwards like a runaway spotlight, from valley floor to mountain top. Even though I pulled off the highway as soon as I could and pulled out my camera as fast I could, I managed to snap only one tiny last bit of yellow-green light atop the ridge (just above the telephone pole's cross-arm) before it disappeared into the gray-blue lowering clouds.

Earlier in the day, I read an article titled "How to Wire Your Brain for Happiness" about a book by Rick Hanson titled Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence. I'm not sure why I decided to read it since I'm not a fan of self-help texts, but what I read smacked me as suddenly like that later light: "The way to hardwire happiness into the brain . . . is to take in the good -- being present in life's tiny, joyful moments."

Even earlier, on Wednesday, I read this in 66 Square Feet: "The relentless Now of an animal's life can make living with a distressed creature almost unbearable. There is no comforting them. There is no tomorrow, no explanation, only the tyranny of the present." 

For Lucy the tyranny of the present was brief; otherwise, she lived in the freedom of the present: attentively and joyfully. For me, on my way home without her, the tyranny of the present lifted in that racing light, smacking me yet again with a colliding set of fabulous realities.