On Bronzed Wings

The ribbon road runs westward, winding winsomely along the verdant valley floor.

On the right, fields flow by, hay fields with their nascent sprouts, cornfields tilled but as yet unplanted, roadside barns, gravel drives aiming anonymously toward neighbors you know but don’t know, nameless people you say hello to at the Post Office, the gas station, the general store.

On the left, a thin screen of maple trees unfurl their prayer flags in the steepening rays of a setting sun, celebrating their own arrival with a symphony of lime and chartreuse.

Beyond that runs The River, down and back to your upward and ahead, contrary to your Mission Homeward and simultaneously central to the world which you inhabit, an irrepressible canvas of blue light and pink noise, the sight-and-soundtrack of a riverine existence.

And above it, appearing and disappearing between the ecstatically budding trees, an undulating patch of bronze parallels your journey, catches your eye, connects with something deep inside of you.

You forget the road and focus on the bronze, and it becomes an Eagle, wings rowing effortlessly through it’s own ethereal stream, the long, low rays reflecting first off its smooth uppers, then off its dense lowers, seeming to propel it forward with every beat of its heart, every breath, every tick of the odometer.

For a thirty second eternity you move through time together, siblings on a journey, Destination Unknown, stripped of every intention other than being, watching each other exist and not exist through the shadows and light of the intervening reality, your windshield reflecting the same setting sun which warms its brilliantly white head, the powerful hook of its golden beak, its glorious tail splayed in aerodynamic perfection as it appears, disappears, appears, disappears, and finally fades into the night.

Thank you, Father Sky, for sharing another of your children with me.

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I’m sorry I don’t have photographs; it was all too brief, and I was all too mesmerized.