The Midwestern autumn carried the warmth of the summer in its days.  Two days before Thanksgiving, the temperature held to 50 in the daytime.  This night, I arrived home from work at half-past midnight.  The little, townhome village within the giant city I lived in slept along with that city, windows dark and doors locked.  The whole city prepared itself and repaired itself for the beginning of the winter festival.  I glanced up to the zenith of the sky, and the white lunar light soaked through the solid cover of cloud, blotting it with its stain, as if a vast extra-terrestrial ark floated in the upper atmosphere.

Without expectation, the clouds parted in the shape of a great eye, and I saw the bone moon as the iris of that eye.  As the clouds moved, so too did that frightening iris.  How forbidding was that singular eye cast down in an ivory stare at me.

It remains throughout most moments ignorant of our suffering, conveniently unaware of my insignificance.  But this night, that undeviating eye glared cool, with the utterest dark blue sea in which swam its focus.  It knew me, whether I wanted it to be known or not.  It saw me, even when I did not wish to be seen.  Known wholly by that ancient, vast One in my nakedness, with no remoteness left in myself, in an un-negated  propinquity where each cell within the small-bodied self is brushed and scrutinized.

As the platinum clouds folded back over the pallid moon, the lid drew itself to close and unknowing, and the God who had realized me allowed me to fall back into a merciful anonymity.  Returned to my aloneness, relieved to be the unknown, the unseen corner of creation.

© 2015 by Michael C. Just