DAILY PROMPT: Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).
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With prompts like this one, I wish I were more of a poet to truly capture the splendor in sights and sounds. I actually have a series of moment from this year. How lucky am I? I walked into these moments as one person and walked out of them another.
Moment #1: Traveling to Zion & Bryce Canyon with my mom.
I met my parents in Las Vegas this fall and we had a great time. I love my parents, but I’m really loving getting to know them as adult people. We have a ton of fun together. My mother and I decided to take a day trip from Vegas to Zion National Park. It was a long day in a van with strangers, but I’d never been to the dessert before. At every van stop the landscape literally took my breath away. It was hot and dry — and that seems obvious, but that is what I remember when you live in Seattle.
I love camping and hiking in National Parks and my mother is crazy for nature, so it was so awesome to be there together. Even better Bryce Canyon is a very high viewpoint, and my mother, who is not a big fan of heights challenged herself to walk out and peak over the edge of the canyon. She is brave.
We learned about the canyon’s history as a holy land, and I have to admit, that if I had stumbled into this canyon as a pioneer, I would have dropped to my knees in reverence. It was just awesome. Beautiful.
Moment #2: A decade of Crater Lake.
Second moment is another nature experience. This summer Ken and I went to Crater Lake for his birthday.
10 years ago, my friends in Washington DC and I flew to the West Coast to have a great adventure that included a drive up the California coast, Redwoods, and Crater Lake. It is a trip that now lives in infamy with our little crew.
Jump ahead, Ken and I are back there this summer. The best thing about Ken (and there is a lot to love about Ken) is that he is always “game” for whatever crazy concoction I dream up. It is true. One year I wanted to wrap our house in a giant red bow like they do to the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and he made it happen. So when I made him wear a birthday hat, drink champagne and eat cupcakes that had been in a cooler for three days — he did it. He is awesome.
So in this same vein, when I drag him out of our cozy sleeping bags at 5am to drive 30 minutes to the edge of a crater to see the sun come up (in very cold weather) — he does it. The sun came up over the crater and I realized:
I had seen that same sun,
come up over that same crater,
in the same chilly morning air,
10 years before.
When I first saw the lake I could not have foreseen a move cross county, running a presidential campaign, falling in love, having a nervous breakdown, driving back across the country, and then moving back to the Pacific NW because I could not help but be in love with this man, meeting His Holiness the Dalai Lama, working on a tech (or two), moving into a cute little house with a perfect Christmas tree, new babies in my life, losing precious spirits I love, and arriving on the other side of it all with more gratitude, more understanding. and more amazing stories then I would have ever anticipated.
My life is so different than what I would have expected it to be when I first looked over that crater, but now, here it is. It fits me like a glove. Cheers to these moments I have rescued…
Reminds me of one my favorite poems.
It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,
and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets for vinegar and oil.
Alll of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the hasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of you shoulders
that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way that stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.
Then all of the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all of the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.
Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment,
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.
- Billy Collins
