When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw "the tree with the lights in it." It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I'm still spending that power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
As we slow down we come to realize that we are persons called in time and space TO BE freely and fully human and that therein is our sanctity. We see that an individual life is a GIFT entrusted to us freely and generously by God. When I struggle to live a life of affirmation, I must ultimately let go of trying to control all the variables of existence and surrender in faith to the freeing power of the providential plan. This only happens when I emphasize in my day-to-day life the time and place TO BE alone, TO BE with friends, TO BE with other workers and TO BE with God.