I'm grateful to be with my folks in Colorado, but I'm simultaneously missing my home in Germany these days. (It's a fun TCK perk to be home and homesick at the same time.) So here's a musing I wrote in April on a solo hike during one of the many 2020 quarantines.
A shot from this day
Sideways Sunrays
Psalm 16:6
Perched on a bench far above Kandern, I dangle my feet and overlook the Hexenplatz. Legends abound about this place, cantering in all corners of the Black Forest. Before me lies a circle of stone, numbers etched on its octagonal sides. Next to me a memorial marks the spot of a plane crash and death of a high-profile politician. But none of the whispered myth, mystery, or murder occupies my mind right now.
I’m entranced by the dance happening straight out in front of me. Seams of light filtering through fir boughs bounce off golden flecks whipping around in the wind, a glitter parade over the Platz. In an intricate interplay of light, shadow, and color, like Fasching* confetti, the pollen falls to wash the woods clean – which of course it can’t. At home it coats cars and gutters, marring recently washed windows. And yet here in the forest, it’s a merry kind of fairy tale magic.
For a moment of atonement, in this thin place that holds horror for some and hatred for others, redemption refracts off pollen in the sideways sunrays. I look up, higher than the hills where my help fails to come from. Gilded light leaks from heaven’s throne room itself, redeeming even this place and this moment. Heaven and earth meet, marrying pleasant lines around my beautiful inheritance.
*Fasching is the German world's version of Carnival, the party before Lent starts.
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