Let this be for this morning’s sky, fuchsia spilled nearly too vivid across first light, as if this day began without consulting any of us, as if we have been written in after the fact.
Let this be for April’s scarlet paintbrush and bluebells and bitterroot, their colors assembling out of sight, insistent beneath the visible, the already decided.
Let this be for the small man behind the coffee counter, his voice bearing the residue of elsewhere, his smile arriving first, and fully, as if nothing persuaded him otherwise.
Let this be for the tiny hungry birds, mouths open to the sky as faith in waiting, cradled in their nest of twigs and soft borrowings, with me an uninvited witness to their small hunger, wondering how far away their mama has gone, and wondering, too, about my own.
Let this be for the hug that undoes me when another’s sorrow passes through without translation, without remedy, and nothing is fixed.
Let this be for the one who unsettles me, who catches against the grain of my patience, and belongs to the same mercy I depend on.
Let this be for the love that deepens out of view, root systems extending where we do not look, holding, holding, holding even when they live mostly in the quiet country of the heart.
Let this be for the breeze, this very one, kissing my skin without explanation, something agreed to long ago in a language we no longer speak.
Let this be for hope, persistent as green threading through cracked stone, refusing disappearance.
Let this be for the life that unfolds, indifferent to my plans, unconcerned with my imagination, always finding me in places I did not know to look.
Let this be for the high and rocky places, where mountains hold sky and something in me falls quiet enough to hear what remains.
Let this be for all of it, the seen, the nearly missed, the already vanishing, for the way meaning gathers not in declaration, but in the pause before we turn away, and the small, saving act of looking again.
