Love Today and Everyday

This morning as I drove along the lakefront, I fantasized about being a painter.  If I were talented in that art of expression, I'd have pulled into a deserted parking lot, fetched my watercolors and done my best to copy the mesmerizing landscape before me so I could always see it and forever feel it.  It was the kind of scene that if honestly rendered, would have spoken to viewers, awed them and certainly evoked any other number of emotions..  Reality is...I have to try and paint this picture with my words.  I don't carry around canvases or sketch books.  I don't own a collection of brushes in many sizes or nature's palette in paints to capture the way the muted slate sky met up with the cerulean inland sea.  Radiating from the sky heavy with haze were beautiful beams of light.  Rays like beacons or flares were reaching through the vapor ala Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I did a triple take.  At least.  It was otherworldly.  Dramatic.  Divine.

I parked  in an out of the way lot just so I could take it all in.  I love the winter sky best.  It's severe in equal measure to the subtlety of the same expanse in summer.  It's harsh.  The juxtaposition between light and dark is sharp and showy. Blue is bluer and white starker.  Perhaps the sky just seems more saturated when the rest of the world is sepia toned and in drab decline.  All I know is I find myself looking up much more than usual these days of late winter to my reverent amazement.

February 14th.  Definitely late winter.  Valentines Day.  The second song that cued up on the cd was My Funny Valentine.  Not just any old rendition, but Rickie Lee Jones'...the best.  Her crooning away while I watched the light show over the lake struck me like cupid's arrow.  There is so much beauty in this world.  It is all around us - above us, beside us and inside us.  All we have to do is open ourselves up to behold it.  There is so much love too, and all we have to do is open ourselves up to receive it.

Those five minutes, which made me ten minutes late for work, were my gift to myself this Valentine's Day.