Had dinner last night with my old friend L and his husband H. "We always start our meals by saying what we're thankful for," I was informed, which seemed sweet in a sort of cheesy way, if also a trifle manipulative. Perhaps I should mention that both L and H are life coaches, that L is an ordained Episcopal priest (among other things), that their lovely house is full of Tibetan tangka paintings, and that L and I have been driving each other crazy for 26 years. H started by giving thanks for L, and for friends, and for the food we were going to eat, and then it was my turn. I gave thanks for travel, and for old friends, and for delicious food, and then went off on an unexpected tangent: I was thankful that the skies had been clear the whole way from New York to San Francisco the day I flew over (Saturday), and that the intricate and beautiful texture of the land below had been highlit by snow, which made me at once insanely happy and somehow sad. Flying back today along the same route, cloudier but still clear often enough to be familiar now, I was again filled with a sense of - I'm not sure what: delight? awe? wonder? The best I can do is show you some of the pictures I took on the way over (and back: the one above and the last were taken today), and fumblingly suggest that it has something to do with scale (patterns we don't see as we live among them), and recapitulation (the same patterns appear on different scales, e.g., in geology and in botany - doesn't the picture above look like a leaf?), and ubiquity (everything is beautiful, memorable), and impersonality (this beauty requires no observer, and while human settlements are part of the large pattern it's not our pattern and we had no idea there was this larger pattern)... I don't know how to describe it. The best I can come up with is "so much" - not just too much to absorb, to notice, to appropriately reverence, but so much feeling and so much distance and so much intimacy. It's not excessive, it's anything but much of a muchness, but "much" is my word. It's not a beautiful word, but, repeated, it seems like a sound of praise which more than human voices might utter. I'm babbling!
