Words of Darkness, Blog of Light

The distance between insanity and genius is measured in success.

It was nearly dark as I left work today.  Heading home, I turned the truck west on the Albion highway and drove into the sunset.  As the rippling fire of red, orange, and purple stretched across the clouds, I was immediately relieved as I reminded myself that such things are no longer my responsibility.

When I was a poet, an artist, and even musician, it would have been up to me to capture that sudden moment of beauty when the setting sun lit the clouds over the dark and frozen hills.  Not anymore.  I don’t have to think about how to describe the clouds, the colors, or even how I would explain the patches of bright yellow sunlight breaking through in spots where there were no clouds.  Someone else can do it.

One night during the summer of 2000, I was leaving the Staples store in Logan, Utah where I worked.  The manager unlocked the front door to let the employees out, then stepped out and locked the door behind him.  We usually waited for him, so we could all walk to our cars together.  As I stood on the sidewalk in front of the store, I looked up across the dark valley at the top of the mountains on the east.  There, a full moon was just beginning to rise above the peaks.  As I looked closely, I could see the distant silhouette of the pine trees against the rising moon.  “Wow,” the manager said when I pointed it out to him.  “It’s true.  You really can see them.  I’ve never noticed before.”

That’s when I got the idea that I am very different from the people who “never noticed before.”  For some reason, the people who couldn’t be bothered to notice a full moon rising over a mountain peak were the same people who seemed to be accomplishing things and progressing in their lives.  My life, it seemed, had become a vicious circle of failure.  I couldn’t seem to advance in either school or work.  I had to place the blame somewhere.

I soon decided that I wouldn’t look up anymore.   Every stretch of moonlight across snow, every sunrise across the river, and every light breeze on a green summer day became a problem for someone else.  My new strategy was to experience each moment as deeply as possible, but not capture it in any way.

In the summer of 2004, when Novalie was only a year old, we were having one of our daddy-daughter days at the Willow Park Zoo in Logan.  Having visited the bobcats, we made our way back to the grassy area of the small zoo, and I held Novalie up against me so that her head was above mine.   I looked up at her as the wind moved the sunlight through her wispy baby hair.  She looked down at me and spoke softly in her baby voice as she held my head tightly.  I suddenly became aware that I was living an important moment that I would remember for the rest of my life.  A moment I would want back almost as soon as it was over.  Immediately I knew that there was nothing I could do to capture or save that moment in time.  I had to let it happen.  I had to let it pass.  I couldn’t hold it.

I was thankful not to have the responsibility of capturing that moment, because I didn’t know how.

Like a snowflake melting in my hand, I could only give it all my attention until it was gone.