2/11/2016 7:20am Driving southeast through Westbury on the Meadowbrook
The sun has just risen, flooding light across everything I can see. It is low enough in the sky still that every bridge I pass blocks the sun itself, leaving, for just a moment, the sky glowing with the soft hues of yellow, orange, even pink without the searing glare of the sun itself. Flashes, moments in time; blink-and-you-miss-it moments flash through my windshield like stripes of an optical illusion as I speed down the parkway; glaring blindness as the sun reveals itself contrasted with brief flashes of relief as it’s hidden, leaving behind a soft glow illustrated in beams seemingly shooting out from the bridges as I pass, cutting through the chilly morning haze like beacons from lighthouses at the shore.
If I believed in such things, I would call it the ethereal light that emanates from angels; glowing beams of light left in their wake, while their form is hidden from human eyes. Striking through the bleary, confusing haze of that in-between-dreaming-and-awake state are heavenly beams of yellows and ambers, oranges and pinks. The sweet relief that comes from a lazy morning stretch in a warm bed; the sense of awakening after sleeping long past dawn; releasing a breath, and with it, all anxieties and thoughts of the long days ahead – simply existing, here, now.