Stained Glass Windows

This is about as spiritual as I get:  I am at the river, a warm fall day.  Despite the wind, the sun has found my naked body and holds me on a slender length of sand.  The blue sky is cloudless, so blue that it might stain my hands.  I reach up to it, not idly, but in a series of repetitive stretches that help me.  I explore my will as much as my muscles, my skin, my bones.  The river, beside me, stretches away from me calmly in tiny eddies and waltzing whirlpools.  The dance on the green surface belies the undertow beneath.  

It is always like that.
  

The gusts want badly to undress the trees.  They are demanding and passionate.   Their insistence checks my balance.  I am standing on one leg, on my left leg, my toes are molding to the sand.  The entire earth supports me.  Nevertheless, I topple over, a victim of the wind.  I look up.  Whatever other leaves have been plucked from the trees--whatever leaves are left--there is a single refugee out there, up there.  This one has somehow ridden the invisible confusion of currents and now is suspended some thirty or forty feet in the air.  Pausing.  Above the seemingly serene water, it catches its own reflection.  It starts to fall.  The golden tentacles of this strange star/fish have curled onto the palm and dried there.  This has created a kind of pinwheel that--catching the invisible resistance in the air--is spinning (delicately, slowly) in its descent.  This is a quiet rapture in reverse.  My eyes follow...

the lift, the loft...

the impossible spiral...

the staircase...

and...

finally...

the gilded memory, the memento of spring, lands on the surface of the water.  A golden coin cast into a superstitious fountain will send ripples that rise and fall. This is the way the small things shake us; a disruption will have repercussions.  Alternating green , and blue as if the sky has shattered, the mirror you might be looking for is just there.  Circles expand demanding that we grow with them.  The golden boat is being pulled, slowly below the surface.  So much of what we touch escapes us, drown or blown away.  Everything is subject to gravity.

This is about as spiritual as God gets too.