it's gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiney day

Wow.  It was so warm and sunny today that the inside of my car heated up and I had to turn on the vent-it was actually hot!  Everywhere I went, I heard the sound of dripping...snow melting off every roof, eve, tree, gutter; sluicing down the sides of the street and running like a quick, cold creek right down the drains.  Even my driveway, which is a skating rink all winter no matter how much of a thaw we get-was reduced to slush and mud.

I desperately wanted everyone I saw inside to go outside.  I so wanted anyone I came in contact with to feel that deep-in-your-bones warmth.

My house faces East so the sun rises in front, out my bedroom window, and sets in back, where we can watch it go down from our deck.  It's a tiny little house and needs a new furnace and my tax statements keep confirming that the value of the house continues on the decline, but even if it was only for this one reason, I'd buy it again and again.

At dusk and at dawn, the inside of the house is painted in all sorts of color and shades of light, very different in the morning and evening, but equally surreal, since the sun really hits the right windows at just the right time.  Whenever I take my boys to school, we've seen the light inside and then we walk right out into the sunrise and one of us always says, "look at that," or "great sunrise this morning."  We invariable remark on the sunset that night, as it's so apparent even if we're inside; it draws us to the window in the back where we can look out and see the sun setting behind the silhouette of the big, old oak tree and the pine woods behind that.

When we saw the sunrise this morning, it was beautiful, as usual.  I'm sure we noticed, but we didn't know how beautiful it really was.  We couldn't have known then that it was the harbinger of a Spring day when it's really still winter and we all know it's coming back with a vengeance.

Later, I was talking to a friend who is a beautiful woman, inside and out, and I love her very much.  We were talking about how little each of us sees of others on a usual basis.  There are those exceptions when, for whatever reason, we see the essence of another and for that, we are changed, and the bearer new as well.

That's what that sunrise was like today.  It was pretty and we talked about it like we always do and appreciated it, but we really saw just another sunrise.  We didn't see deeper into THIS particular sunrise.  We couldn't.  We didn't know it was bringing unexpected warmth to us.  The trick to seeing the essence of the sunrise, though, isn't to remark on your surprise after the fact.  The trick is to close your eyes and take yourself back to the moment you saw that sunrise-the colors, the smells in the air and the sounds of boys climbing in and backpacks hitting the seat and maybe a little bickering-and to drink in the full awareness that at that time, without any help from you, an unseasonably warm and beautiful day was living in that sunrise.  You see and feel that sunrise anew...you see it's essence and for that moment, your are that sunrise.

We are like that.  It's not that we need to be clairvoyant.  We just need to be conscious of pure and transformative moments in our lives when we get a glimpse of the depth and truth of a person we see every day-husband, wife, child, friend, mother, daughter, father, son, the clerk at 7-11 or the person you have as a companion in the elevator-and then we must adjust our eyes and look at them in all the ways we've known them in light of what we now perceive that we never expected.  To be open to that and to then appreciate it is the gift we give one another when we love.  Not romantic love or familial love or any other kind of emotional give and take.  This is love in the sense that we are willing to be quiet enough and still enough to allow our essence to shine forth or to absorb that essence of another, we immediately complete one another and for that time, we are not afraid.  We are standing in a beam of truth and hope and sheer delight with even that momentary knowledge of what it all really is.  We are in a true state of love-the ability to recognize and appreciate that we are one in the deepest part of ourselves with another; that we are whole and that this completeness is the deepest kind of love there is.  We see in a way we didn't when we first saw.

...and the sunrise is more beautiful now that we know what it had to give us all along.