It was less than 30 minutes till dusk.
I was feeding hay to our sheep.
Cutting the baling twine with my pocket knife,
I had an oblique moment
Where my attention fell
to the waning thin rays of a late November sunset.
And I saw it:
filaments,
thousands of filaments,
uncountable miles of filaments,
spider silk
skipping across the tops
of pasture grass.
Would I have been
a witness to this
had I not had this chore at this moment?
I don’t think so.
I have seen thousands of funnel spiders
in a frosty pasture,
I have been stopped in a thunderstorm
by a migration of salamanders,
I have heard the dinosaur squawks
of greater blue herons coming home to feed and nest.
And more and more,
but not this knit of shine.
My hungry soul had waited a lifetime
for this meal,
to know,
to finally know,
a perfect feast of only a little more than nothing.
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Each day offers the opportunity of new surprises like this. I hope you enjoy many, many more.
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I am so thankful for knowing you, Daniel. You understand that surprise is more important than certainty or as William Blake insisted, “The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
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“I had an oblique moment
Where my attention fell
to the waning thin rays of a late November sunset.”
and then the world unfolds … lovely, evocative, lyrical poem this morning, Terry
Kevin
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Or perhaps the world unflattens? Thank you for catching the dramatic moment in the poem. And every one of us has oblique/adjacent/emergent moments that unfold as we open to them…should we be so lucky as to snag that rainbow by its tail. That is the pot of gold. Thanks for being a consistent and caring reader. You are a rara avis.
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‘knit of shine’
what a wonderful moment….thanks for sharing and giving us this glimpse of nearly nothing.
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So kind to observe…and note…and make me feel the shine.