I stand at the window, rapt. A luminous globe catches in the top branches of the spruce right outside the window and spills her light, cold and milky white, over fields blue with snow’s chill.
“And that’s us. Yes?” I can just make out a rim of grey edging, inching up swollen, glowing orb.
Farming husband flicks off the last light and we watch.
“Our shadow, anyways.”
A full eclipse on a frigid night in February (when your warm breath hangs like a smudge snagged and etched in the air), the moon’s a rarely held mirror before earth’s shy face.
The words come lost-like, hardly audible.
“We exist.” I try to catch my breath, but it’s gone, just a whisper left behind.
“There we really are.”
Darker, deeper, longer, that’s us moving through the heavens, casting our outline across moon’s lustrous loop. Why am I surprised to see our shadow, and didn’t I really think these cosmic balls were all threaded together, spinning at His Word?
A child captivated with her own silhouette, I’m riveted, stuck, to this place. Farming husband pecks me goodnight, turns towards beadboard bedroom door. His head hurts, a long night of directing a hundred kids running, leaping, diving through games for the church kid’s program. And like he says every night, tomorrow comes early.
I grab his hand. “Backrub?”
He shrugs his shoulders. “You’re busy. I’m okay.”
“Never too busy for you.”
His eyes smile quietly. The same way that threw me into a flutter of butterflies in Mr. Schurter’s grade nine math class. Yes, I have time to rub and touch and know you in this moment while God choreographs the sparrows, stars, planets, universe. I don’t say any of that but I don’t have to because it’s been two full decades since we learned (and I’ve forgotten) integers and angles so he already knows what unconnected, flimsy thoughts flit about inside of me. And takes me anyways.
Lightly touching his back, circling, then pressing deeper, orbiting muscles and sinews tied too tight, I rub in love and he closes his eyes. He wordlessly unknots, and somewhere inside he drifts away, and I am left alone with the moon.
Through the spruce's drowsing limbs, I see our shadow now fully embracing her. She flushes red, warmed.
Standing at the edge of this room, these fields, this planet, rubbing away this man’s headache, it seems clear that the only way to see us--- really know that this globe exists, is, rotates in the blackness--- is solely in the reflection seen on the face of the moon.
I watch God stretch His fingers across the night sky to align the sun, earth and moon in the universe, and I feel Him line up something in me too. This soul eclipse ripens: Maybe that too is the only way we know for certain that we exist, rotate and spin—that we are. By the shadow our love casts on the faces of those whom we orbit.
Then earth begins to drift away and I’m left in the frozen quiet of a February night to think about watching faces to see the outline of my own soul.
Father, cause me to slow and watch the outline that I cast. Do the faces around me reflect the shadow of Your love shining past me? Does my soul silhouette look like Your love?
1 John 4:12 "No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us."
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