Standing Stll

Standing Still                          

By John W. Vander Velden

 

I find myself standing still in the dark.  The winter’s night surrounds and flakes sail on the faint breath of crisp air.  The cold stings in my lungs on each breath that is drawn and when released floats as a small cloud of my making, drifting an instant and gone.  I stand where I am and feel the cold, watch the snow falling, taste the pure air, and smell a pureness of a world scrubbed clean by the winter.

Closing my eyes, drawing frozen air deep within, holding it a moment, I know.  Not all things can be held, seen, or touched.  Perhaps it is through life we learn about the “more”.   Perhaps it is a gift.  Some might consider the knowing a curse, but I find that knowledge among my greatest possessions.  For here in the dark I understand that I am surrounded by the “more”.  More than the cold.  More than the snow.  More than the darkness.  More than even my life.  More than I can ever know.  The unseen but real that exists everywhere.

My mind thinks of a single kernel of corn, small and orange.  I imagine it in my hand, hard and cold.  I can feel it as I roll it between my fingers. I know if I were to open the seed I would find only starch, for the miracle it contains is too small to see.  But when the year’s snows are but a memory I will place seeds carefully in uncountable rows and know that those seeds will soon be “more”.   I am confident that stalks will grow from those tiny bits I have held.

The thought reminds me that not everything can be placed in a box.  Though the human race may stretch our knowledge, questions remain.  Simply because those questions go unanswered does not decrease their relevance, for there are truths that go on beyond our reach.  I find comfort in the secure knowledge that the cosmos does not exist as some random accident, and recognize that I am part of something greater.

On a winter’s night my senses attune to the world, the cold, the dark, to the gently falling snow, to my heartbeat.  I know that my life’s complexities and difficulties will not simply vanish, like the mist of my breath on this night.  Yet knowing I do not face these things alone gives me peace.  For I am confident that liberally blended in the “more”, the unfathomable greatness, is love.

Standing still, I know I am surrounded by the reality I can touch and “more”, and comforted knowing that within that intangible, love exists. 

(437 Words)