Beauty
When I come out of my office at the end of a ten-hour day, I sometimes have a religious experience right in the parking lot. Monday's was especially intense.
It was around seven o'clock and the sky was overcast but lambent, like a giant abalone shell turned over the world, and to the west was a strip of creamy yellow light as the sun set behind the clouds. It had rained off and on during the day while I was inside, and the empty lot reflected the silver sky in puddles. The parking grid glowed in that unearthly light, too, its geometric pattern stretching precisely to the far reaches of the lot.
The air smelled of rain and loam, and in the tallest, dead branch of a tree where he always sits, a mockingbird sang his chain of unrepeating trills.
Everything, everything, was rich and gorgeous - the heavy green of the trees and vines, the weighty light, the sheer three-dimensionality of the scene. I stood in the parking lot turning around and around. I realized that what gives me that feeling is coming out of my lovely ten-by-twelve office to the world and plunging into the depth of field like an ocean - total, magical.
It was around seven o'clock and the sky was overcast but lambent, like a giant abalone shell turned over the world, and to the west was a strip of creamy yellow light as the sun set behind the clouds. It had rained off and on during the day while I was inside, and the empty lot reflected the silver sky in puddles. The parking grid glowed in that unearthly light, too, its geometric pattern stretching precisely to the far reaches of the lot.
The air smelled of rain and loam, and in the tallest, dead branch of a tree where he always sits, a mockingbird sang his chain of unrepeating trills.
Everything, everything, was rich and gorgeous - the heavy green of the trees and vines, the weighty light, the sheer three-dimensionality of the scene. I stood in the parking lot turning around and around. I realized that what gives me that feeling is coming out of my lovely ten-by-twelve office to the world and plunging into the depth of field like an ocean - total, magical.