home is where one starts from

sometimes it's enough

it seems the moment i let the word "content" leave my mouth, it ceases to be a reality in my life. so i've stopped saying i'm content unless i also mention i'm restless. i'm always both, though maybe not always in the exact same second.
i remember a conversation from way back when i was a teenager, sitting in a field looking out over grass and trees and distant mountains. i don't remember which friend was keeping me company, but i remember sharing feelings of longing brought on by the beauty of our surroundings. i remember the feeling, because it's followed me ever since and it follows me still. at the time i described it as not being able to enjoy the trees because the pain of wanting to be in them was too great. i hoped heaven was the kind of place where great beauty didn't cause pain.
this year i fought myself in my head so much over my inability to enjoy beauty in and of itself. if i took a walk, it was so much more enjoyable to notice the flowers and shining mica dust if i told someone about it in my mind, wrote about it to them later, collected flowers to stash in books...a moment was full if i could take something from it, know i wasn't alone in it. i don't think there's anything wrong with a need to capture and share, but it did bother me that i felt more pained than blessed by the beauty only my eyes would know.
if i let the beauty fill me, it left me uneasy and helpless with what to do with it. what do you do with it?
i love these words from c.s. lewis' book till we have faces: "it was when i was happiest that i longed most...the sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."
so i guess this longing to be in the beauty, to know it more deeply and fully than just by sight, is a longing for heaven--a longing for the person behind it's making. but i believe that heaven starts now, that He Is right now.
so i'm practicing taking beauty in, and doing nothing with it. sometimes i sit and list the things of a moment so i can recognize them. sometimes i sit and try to feel a moment. sometimes i sit and look until i see more than what is there. i'm learning to thank God in the moment, and that makes me smile over it.
it's still hard. i will always be content and restless. with life. with beauty. with a moment.
but today i sat in the car waiting, and i looked out the window and saw wind rustling the leaves of a tree. it was so tender, so sweet, almost like invisible hands moving through it. at first it gave me that little discomfort of longing and i didn't want to look, but then i decided to get over myself and i watched. it was enough, and more than enough. it was a breath for me.