It Happened Again: The Mystic

Marginal Way, Ogunquit, Maine; photo c Charley Freiberg

It happened again, the other day. Suddenly, the world shifted, and what had been a busy, time-fraught, madly-dashing whirlwind became one of those precious moments in time that you know will hang in your memory forever, and for the next 20 years, or 40 years, or 60 years - however long you live - you'll recall it clearly.

It's never an "important" moment - the surprise birthday party, the wedding ceremony, the receiving of an award...all these memories will make you smile and tickle your spirits, but you find that after 5 years, or 10, maybe, the memory you have of those times is more a memory of the memory. It might take the shape of the stories you've told or been told about the event, or the photos you've looked at so many times. And everyone who was there will have a slightly different memory of what happened, what it meant.

No, the moment I'm talking about is usually fairly insignificant - and yet, it will be one of the moments in which you know yourself to be fully alive, and fully in communion with the people around you. You and whoever else shared the moment will share the same memory, the same emotion, the same understanding of the moment. You might try, but you won't be able to tell stories about it, because it'll be a moment when nothing unusual actually happened. There will be no photos, because there would be no way to record the moment. Instead, you'll sometimes say to another person who was there: "You remember that day?" and the other person will smile a special smile, and say, "Oh, that day..." and then you'll both return there, for just a few seconds, no need for any more words.

You can't plan one of these moments. Somehow, sometimes, everything in your particular universe will simply fall into an unusual harmony, and there you are. It will be delicious, and quiet, and mystical, and afterwards, you'll long for another such moment. But if another never happens - you can always revisit the one that did, and it will be all right, because the entire meaning of life is distilled in that one moment.

I've been lucky, I've had several of those moments. 

One was with a patient, who’d had cancer 50 years prior which seemed to have cured itself; but now she was dying from it. I went to her home when she could no longer come to my office for treatment, but, she said, she knew it was only a matter of days. Instead, she said, let's just talk. So we did, about homely things, and how beautiful the fall leaves were, and how blue the sky seen through them. And then we became silent, and the quality of the light coming in her late afternoon window somehow created one of those mystical moments, and we looked at each other, and smiled. She was right, her remaining time was only a few more days; but I remember that moment, to the individual dust motes as they floated in the air, lit up by the afternoon light; I remember, and I grow warm and happy inside.

One day, many years ago, Husband and the Cellar Dweller and the Tall Dude had been working hard; it was hot, they were sweaty, they took the First Hound and went to out-back neighbor Eddie B.'s pond. When The British Car Gal  and I returned from running errands, we were hot and hungry. We made a picnic and took it to the pond, guessing the others were there. In a few minutes we all and the dog were in the pond, and the world shifted, and everything became clear in its perfection: the sun, the heat, the water droplets as we dove and emerged, the hunger, the company, the food and drink, the end of the day, the smell of the water, the hovering dragonflies, the birds murmuring, the slow evening. The Tall Dude and I looked at each other and said, "We couldn't have made this happen. We couldn't have planned this. This was the perfect day." And it was; and it still is; and we still need only say, "Remember that day?" and there we are, again.

We don’t talk about grace much, anymore. These moments I'm trying to describe are moments of grace. We can't cause them to happen, but we can be willing vessels for them to brew in. 

In the autumn, when the swamp maples flare around us like a spinning bowl, and the late afternoon shadows grow long, and the smell of musk, of sun-warmed drying grasses, of damp earth and fallen apples wind ‘round us as dusk deepens; when the birds hush, and the dragonflies spark in the last sunlight; when the wind becomes a gentle flow and the unseen wildings all around us quiet to a murmur, dry leaves whisper as they fall, and a lingering toad croaks a slow, solitary paean while the last crickets crumb fading carols– when all this happens, and the cats come sleepy-eyed into the garden and the world holds its breath before letting out a sigh and giving in to nightfall – 

Now, do it now – step outside, into the grace, into the mystic.

Originally printed in The Concord Monitor, September 18, 2016, as “Moments of Grace.”