Unexpected Moments of Beauty

It's time to pause again for a bit...

I've written of my thoughts on moments of beauty in the past:

Moments of pure beauty: pausing to freeze a specific point amidst the hubbub, chaos, confusion, and difficult feelings of our lives and recognize the pure joy, the pure wonder and magic of our living experience. Pausing to savor and appreciate such a moment sloughs away the compounding antagonisms and we can immerse ourselves into coming back to feeling the natural breath of life. We can come back to existing within that gift of being fully present with and appreciating our lives.

Sometimes moments of beauty are not truly "beautiful" as fits the definition but, instead, come as a swift and hard knock side the head that knocks us back into the present moments of our lives.

This actually happened a while back and I'd intended to write of it back then, Unfortunately a monster decided to wreak its mayhem in Connecticut and I lost all other senses of the moment.

I was walking the Weewolfe early one Saturday evening over at one of the local gravel pits while waiting for Tulip to finish-up her late afternoon shift. Our dog's a rescue and can be somewhat fear-aggressive at times. This place over in back of a couple of big-box stores is one of the few areas where we find sufficient solitude to be able to let her off leash to run as a border collie should with little worry.

Walking through the solitude, the cold twilight, and fresh snow, this was definitely not the walk it could have been and my thoughts were racing over several depressing things—stupid things, really—that had occurred over the week. My mood was as dark as the low-lying clouds and as equally oppressive.

I stomped down off the ridge behind the pit, my mood intensifying the entire way and losing myself further into that morass. The Weewolfe raced around ahead of me, a happy black blur against the snow and totally oblivious to the darkness in me.

Jaw clenching, teeth grinding, thoughts roiling, fists clenching in pockets, feet stomping, stomp-stomp-stomp-whump!

Feet no longer stomping, the ice lying under the powdery snow sent them straight out and the rest of me flat on my back before I could even pull my hands free from my jacket pockets. With the wind knocked out of me, I heard and felt the ice cracking under my back and I really hoped I hadn't gone down on the big puddle that I'd noticed had been building-up in weeks past, before the freeze-up.

The ice didn't crack enough to dunk me and I dazedly stared up at the ceiling of clouds...

...and at the hole that had opened-up above me with stars twinkling in the deep twilight as a cold nose hurriedly pressed itself to the side of my face, a warm tongue lapped at me, and 37 pounds of worried border collie pressed herself next to me.

The week no longer seemed so bad when rejoicing in that beautiful here and now.