The relative size of things

One night long ago, coming home late from a full day of work-then-school, I pulled into the driveway of my house, locked the car, looked up, and stopped.  Just stopped.  For a long time.

Awestruck.

There was something in the sky.  Something I had never seen before.  Something that was amazing and huge and incredibly, indescribably, beautiful.  It reminded me of some pictures I had seen of far-off nebulae, those beautiful collections of gas and dust and stars, invisible to the naked eye.  Only this, whatever it was, filled a third of the sky, and I found myself unable to look away.  My street was dark, with few street lights.  The night was cool, and the breeze smelled sweet from the wild grasses that grew everywhere.  And I couldn't look away.

I don't know what it was.  I never found out.  I caught the tail-end of some mention of it on the radio the following day, not enough to learn what it was, and that was it.  It was gone the following night.  Most people never saw it.

I've never forgotten it though, and I hope I never will.  The memory is important to me, far more important than a pretty view would suggest.  In fact, the memory is essential to me, and somehow necessary to my sense of myself.

It wasn't just the beauty of the thing.  It wasn't just the size of the thing.  It wasn't just the unexpectedness of it, the surprise.  It was something, something more. 

Gazing up,
My eyes full of the sight of it.
My ears full of the sound of the wind in the trees. 
My nose full of the sweet scent of the grass. 

I saw it. 

Completely.  For just a moment.

For just a moment, the relative size of things was visible before me.  The size of the beautiful thing in the sky, so huge, so small compared to the star-filled sky beyond it.  The size of myself, so small, so huge compared to the sand beneath my shoes.  And all of it - myself, the sand, the grass in the breeze, the beauty in the sky, the stars beyond - all of it infinitely precious.  All of it infinitely beautiful.  All of it completely essential, and exactly, exactly what it was.  Nothing more.  Nothing less.

Awestruck is too small a word for what I saw/felt/knew in that moment.

I found myself thanking God, singing His praises to the sky for the making of such wondrous things as sand and grass and people and amazing sights in a night sky.  Grateful.  Full to overflowing.

And this from me?  I was doing this?  Unselfconsciously?  Me?  A woman who didn't go to church.  A woman who didn't know God, not well anyway.  A woman who didn't pray.  A woman whose life was disintegrating around her as her husband disappeared into the surreal no-mans-land of drug addiction.  A woman who had gone back to school at night in a desperate attempt to hold on to something normal, keep a perspective on a normal life.  None of that mattered in that moment. 

All that mattered was that glimpse of the relative size of things.  So tiny.  So vast.  And all of it, ALL of it precious.  Infinitely precious.  Including me - as unbelievable as it seemed then and now - including me and everyone, everything else.

I think about the passage from Genesis where it says that God looked upon his work and saw that it was good, very good.

I dare to say...  I think that may have been an understatement.