Coffee spills and sky lights

Photo used under Creative Commons by Algo

It’s that part of winter when you’ve had your heater sitting on the table by the couch so long that you forget that you ever used the table as a place to sit your coffee. Yesterday, I had the coffee and the heater on the table and I spilt a full cup on the cream carpet. It was really pretty amazing that it was the first time it happened.

After it happened, I moved everything, got some paper towels and cool soapy water and went about dabbing and scrubbing. It looked as if I did such a fine job. When I got home from work, the coffee stain was back. It looked up at me as if I’d turned my back and walked away from it.

So today I put the heater on the floor and wondered why I never thought of it before.

It’s kind of like sitting on the loveseat with my laptop. It took me a long time just to try it. Sitting at my desk was all I’d ever done.

I still haven’t adjusted. I haven’t found the ultimate way to do this typing from a curled up position. I start out with my feet under me and the laptop on my knees. It’s not bad, but I keep losing the mouse. I sit at an angle and have the laptop propped on pillows. I still keep losing the mouse. Sometimes I’ll leave the laptop on the coffee table and spend an hour leaning. The mouse is less of a problem but my back and arms get a little cranky.

I sit in the dark in the morning so that the two cockatiels who share the room with me don’t wake up (and wake everyone else)…and so that I can see the sky change. This furthers the chances of losing the mouse and spilling the coffee. I grope in the dark behind the glow of the laptop screen until the light of day begins to illuminate.

It’s coming now. There is a straight line across the horizon, a band like two cut strips of paper separating night from day. I keep looking without it registering, looking in that way you do when you know something is different, don’t really care, but then find that your eyes keep returning of their own to investigate. That’s what I’ve been doing since I sat down. It is literally as if the shades are pulled. A swatch of morning sky and then darkness…as if the sky itself is capped, a shade pulled to half-mast.

Then…okay, it’s been a half hour, my legs are falling asleep…stretch them out to rest on the coffee table. Okay. There’s the mouse, still on the arm of the couch. Okay…just checking in…the sky is still there. The bottom strip is orange now though, the top, gun- metal gray…but as fast as I can type, right before my eyes…drifting, drifting toward blue. Suddenly the line is gone, the blue changed so fast from gray, to almost white, the orange falling lower, almost disappearing, leaving in its wake a golden glow so momentary it is almost unobservable. Finally the whole affair seems settled and turns into a watercolor of muted pastels.

Man. What a life.

One of the things I’ve been writing about lately is how spiritual experiences happen in such a way that you don’t know what happened, only that something did, and that whatever it was is beyond dispute. I’ve compared the bewildered fog you can get in afterwards to the fog of grief. I’ve been imagining that one prepares you for the other, sort of like the morning sky prepares you for all the changes of a day…the stain that comes back…the sunrise that, even when you thing it’s done, suddenly bursts out with a blossom of neon pink.

You sit in the fog like you sit in the dark until it gives way to light.