In joy and beauty
They were dark days. No, it isn’t a metaphor. It’s a weather report. For two days in late July the sun barely rose. Thunder rolled and rain sheeted down. The wind tore off branches as if they were toothpicks. Land flooded.
Then, as it does in this southwest Saskatchewan prairie climate, the sun came out. Clarity and azure. Cumulonimbus like whipped cream towers. Sparkles everywhere. A pronghorn leaps toward the horizon; a hawk wheels in the sky. Three inches of rain in a year where there hadn’t been this much moisture in the entire spring and summer together so far. This grateful dry country celebrates, and all the people in it.
A week later, an August wedding. “There’ll be direction signs”, the bride had said. “It’s in the middle of nowhere.”
You follow a small highway and then a gravel road. The gravel road becomes a track and the track, unbroken grassland. You stand on the edge of a wide valley, in joy and beauty. “You must have had good rain this year,” a wedding guest says. “The grass around here looks wonderful.”
It does. And everyone standing in it. The bride and groom and all friends and family join in beginning a new life together. We glow in the western light. We celebrate.
Maybe it is a metaphor, for the creative process and the artist’s life. You have days of aridity and darkness, and days of unexpected growth. Then for one perfect day, or one perfect lifetime, you feel golden. You celebrate.
What do you celebrate in your artist’s life?
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