"In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again."
— Barbara Kingsolver (High Tide in Tucson)
The rain is letting up as I bundle him up and take him outside for a bit. He wants to walk through what is left of the vegetable garden (a few sad beets) and then fills his dump truck with fallen leaves, dumping them out to make piles in the grass. We talk about the birds at the feeder and why there are no bugs or spiders to look for. He picks up whirligigs from the red maple tree and tucks a few in his pockets and then heads off to stand by grandpa, who is talking to the neighbor over the fence. I take this moment to scoot inside to get my camera. I take photos of him of course, and a couple of the dog, and the birds, but it is those whirligigs that have captured my attention too.
It is later when I come inside and have time to slip my camera card into my computer, that I see I have indeed captured what was tugging at me as I stood among those whirligigs. On a day that others might call bleak and dreary, I saw beauty in the tiny nuances of the shifting of the season. The dreary bleakness only played into this shift, as the leaves had all fallen and the whirligigs were all that were left among the raindrops. I felt indebted to this tree, as I could feel something deep inside of me crack open.
I think about this awareness long after I close down my computer, asking myself how I might pay homage to this awakening after days of darkness? Ideas flit around inside my head in desperation, wanting to find ways to guarantee that it will keep flowing. But I have come to understand that this is part of who I am, and the important thing is not to shut down but rather keep at it over and over again.