My Heart is Full
This past Thursday night was an incredibly beautiful few hours. It began with taking 30 minutes at the end of the day for a slow yoga session to transition from one part of my day to the next. Then we gathered as a congregation for our sacred circles to share about gratitude. People shared beautiful things for which they are grateful - simple things, deep things, personal things, many of which were written on these post-it notes. One person who was there shared with me beautiful words of affirmation of how much the night meant to her. That would have been enough for the day but there was more to come.
As I drove back home, the sun was beginning to approach its setting but was filtered by clouds in a way that we rarely get to see. It was filtered such that you could see the full outline of the sun but without the full brightness. I couldn’t look long at it because I was driving (and hence why there’s no photos of it either). When I got home, I felt that I needed to go back out to see the rest of the sunset that was still to come and what happened was one of those holy, “thin-space” moments.
The moment wasn’t though in the sunset before me, but instead in the clouds behind. When I shared the photos on social media, I added. “Sometimes the beauty isn’t the sunset in front of you but in the clouds behind.” We had just been through several days of major thunderstorms and flooding and the illuminated clouds were the final round of storms that moved through. It was beautiful to see the other side of these clouds and know that we would have a few days without storms coming through over and over.
What kept coming to me over and over that night was simply, “my heart is full.” It was full because of the time taking care of myself, of sharing time with others in gratitude, and then in taking in the beauty of that evening. My heart was full that night and still is today.