now

Every day I wake up happy. Every day I savor the gift of that waking, because this is a happiness I only had when I was small, opening my eyes to a newly fashioned summer day and rolling to my side to look eagerly out the window whose sill rested level with the top of my mattress so that I pretended I slept in the branches that touched the screen. Back then I lay still for a few moments to watch the leaves and listen to my parents talking in the driveway and smell the magic of freshly mown grass, quivering all over with the secret knowledge that I was awake and no one knew it yet and in that moment all of heaven and earth and time were mine in an infinite and possible now.

Lately I've been opening my eyes to the same feeling. More complex, perhaps, with adult demands and adult joys, but lighter and freer and higher and deeper than I've experienced in years, a brilliant awareness of the present, and of present blessings, the "morning moving over the hills."