Open Letter

I want to smooth a place for you, on the sand. You can sit down, beside me. You may get damp, but we'll both dry quickly, in the wind.

Let's really look. Let's try to see the light as it truly is. Not what we think we've seen so many times before. Let's find it, let's have our eyes be opened. The whole world becomes hazy, sometimes. There are so many voices clamoring, scrabbling at the walls, seeking to be heard. But look! The light on the waves is silver and pink and green. These colors are miracles, our eyes are miracles, the earth is a miracle. God hovering over the waters.

Tell me your sadness, I want to say. I've hit a wall, too, I'm trying to scrabble over my own large fence. Bringing my bulldozers, getting lost along the way. I get hot and thirsty too. Sometimes I feel like I'm staring at the light and I just can't see it. What have I put over my eyes? I wonder. What dullness have I wrapped myself in?

It's then that I'm glad just to know the light is there. It's all so beautiful, all of it. The goodness is truly good, though I'm hard and crusty and it can't find its way to the depths of me. We're watching a sunset and part of me is yawning, wanting to get home, and part of me is still a child inside. Let's stay! Let's never leave! Let's dig a hole and live in it, we can pull coconut fronds over the opening. We can light candles far down inside, away from the wind. The yawning part most often stands up, heads home to make dinner.

Tell me your sadness. The waves are all silver and grey now. The sky is changing a hundred shades a second. It's moving on, we are tilting quickly and slowly, all at once, toward night. There's all the time in the world to shine a tender light on your grief, and yet this time right now is all we have. Tell me your sadness, spill it all. Tell me and maybe I will understand, even as the dark falls and the sand becomes another black sea and we shrink, like children, into the sand.