Everything Sparkles

There is a small morning window (not every day) when the world outside my house sparkles. I’m not a meteorologist, but I believe the dew is thickest when the night temperature dips significantly enough to create a veritable carpet of plump and pearly packets. 

Maybe you don’t correlate dew-covered landscapes with Hawai’i, but those who live here know; on the mountain, it gets cold enough to glisten. 

The illumination is akin to a fresh blanket of snow when the low-angled sun hits it or a hoar frost coating bare limbs in ice that glitters. 

Here, the foliage is still green, nothing dormant, not even the weeds (much to our dismay), and on certain mornings, it wears a coat of perfectly tensioned, light-reflecting droplets, and the whole landscape shines with them. 

Millions of dewdrops adorn the world, and I am surrounded by them winking at me, and the beauty of it—such a mundane and simple thing—fills me with awe. 

They’re an easy thing to miss or dismiss, these fleeting moments of overwhelming beauty because they are simple and commonplace—we get dew most mornings, but having the sun at the perfect angle to light it up like so many stars is not a daily thing. 

Or is it?

Maybe I just don’t see. Or I see it, and I let it slide away, unregistered, undocumented. Gone. 

This morning, after a couple of days of rain, the sky was a flawless blue, and the sun, still low in the winter sky, worked its effortless magic, making a perfect pairing of the glittering landscape. 

I stood at my front door and marveled, Everything sparkles, I whispered to myself, the awe creeping in not yet taken root, not yet se its hooks in me to do more than look. I was about to make coffee after all, it’d be reasonable to say, I’ll look at that later. Or I’ll go out with my cup after it’s made and enjoy it then. 

It might have lasted. 

But I think I would have missed the pinnacle of its splendor. 

I certainly would have chased off the whisper, like a gentle breeze on my neck, that said, Grab your camera, look closer. Maybe, if I weren’t writing here, I would have ignored that invitation. Maybe I would have said, What’s the point of that? Coffee, have I mentioned coffee?!, conveniently forgetting the fact that I’m consciously rekindling my longstanding love of photography for no other reason than because I like the way it makes me look at the world. 

How many times in the absence of a reason, measurable and tangible, have I chosen practicality over awe, tasks over transcendence? 

Many. I’d wager. 

But not today. 

This morning, in the scant minutes between dew plump with the night’s chill and melting in the warmth of the sun, I captured it. I let it call me into awe. I chose to be embraced by beauty and to share it.  

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It may be a simple act, but to me, it is miraculous.

And I still got my coffee.