The Glow

Tonight as I drove home, I saw an extraordinarily bright orange-yellow glow right on the eastern horizon, over the town of Bastrop, Texas, which suffered from such severe wildfires this summer. It was, of course, an unusually large, bright moonrise through a veil of clouds that magnified and dispersed the haunting light.

Yet for several miles down the road, over and down hills, hidden by trees and the ever teasing cloud it was very hard to tell for sure whether the glow brought beauty or disaster.

In Between

We often talk of the valleys of life and mountain top experiences. But these tend to be relatively short periods of time. What’s in between?

Is it merely transitioning from a peak to a valley or vice versa? Is it a vast rolling plain without much scenery? Most likely it is a complex set of contours—smaller rises, runs, dips, straightaways, rapids, doldrums. Days where you work hard but have little to show for it. Days where you work hardly at all and still have little to show for it. And of course days of great promise where the interest of all of the ‘unproductive’ days shows up as a big dividend.