If we’re very wise, we can find ourselves happy with little things. For me this morning it’s the rainbows dancing on my ceiling — streaks of prism light from the six prisms given to me by family and various friends over the years, hanging as a mobile where the rising sun strikes through them and sends their colors across my ceiling. If I spin the globe ones, their colors dance among the long streaks of the others, but usually it’s enough simply to have the colors there – clear, pure colors existing as light and nothing else.
Their time is brief, as the sun rises higher and leaves them, and of course there are cloudy mornings when they do not come at all, but pleasure is no less pleasure for being passing or occasional. The pleasure is in the pleasure, and the rainbows across my ceiling are my passing pleasure, come and gone and hopefully to come again.
I begin a little to grasp how powerful was the effect of the giant stained glass windows in medieval cathedrals, their multi-colored glass throwing jeweled patterns in a wonder of colors across stone floors and worshippers, like nothing seen elsewhere in people’s ordinary lives then.
– Margaret
August 27th, 2011 - 1:06 pm
That was beautiful!!!
August 28th, 2011 - 1:48 am
I feel the same about the beauty of sunrise or sunset across a sky. Sometimes I feel as though what I see is just there for me and no one else. The beauty of God’s creation all around us whether in the light patterns from prisms or reflections in the sky. Amazing.
August 29th, 2011 - 11:48 am
Lovely posting. I’m happy to see a new note on your blog.
August 29th, 2011 - 3:28 pm
I think my appreciation of the so-called small is the sharper because I spend so much time stretched across centuries, trying to link the ever-familiar into the long-gone, to help the latter be real for us. As reward, I can be delighted by something as slight as a single drop of dew hanging crystal-clear at the green tip of the leaf of one of my house plants here in front of my computer. Another delight I have is hearing from all of you. Thank you so much.
October 22nd, 2011 - 4:45 pm
I was impressed when I visited cathedrals that have their stained glass relatively complete by how dark it made the interiors and how the windows “jumped out” at you. It was much more impressive than I had ever seen before.