Paradise

• 

Paradise

Today I walked with my dad.

He spent most of the walk looking at the ground.

He kicked pinecones from the path, noticed every crack in the pavement, occasionally stepped on a bug, and shared all the things he knows - about everything that came into his mind.

I walked beside him looking almost entirely at the sky.

A cardinal landed on a trash can as though it were the most natural perch in the world.

A hawk settled onto a branch before a fearless squirrel charged straight toward him, sending him back into the air.

Clouds drifted across the sun, changing nothing except the light. Yet every passing shadow transformed the trees. Leaves became deep green, then yellow, then almost white, before returning to themselves.

It felt as though the world was trying on different ways of being seen.

When we came home, my dad settled into his white rocking chair on the porch. The cushion was the one my mom had insisted would feel too scratchy. He loves it.

He was finally quiet.

I watered the garden.

The steady rhythm of water striking the soil became its own kind of conversation. Mint released its fragrance as I brushed past it. The lemon balm leaves warmed in the afternoon sun. Echinacea leaned unapologetically toward the light.

Later, after a cold plunge, I stretched out on the warm acacia lounger.

Inside, my dad rested with his dog, a documentary, and a small sticky note I had left on the table:

“You are just chilling until lunch while Steph cold plunges then paints.”

It made me smile.

Sometimes love looks like helping someone know where they are before they have to wonder.

Looking across the yard toward my studio, I watched the clouds continue their slow procession overhead.

Each shift in the cloud cover felt like another filter settling over the lens through which I was seeing the world.

The birds seemed unusually alive.

Blue jays raided a nest.

Cardinals stood guard.

Squirrels chased one another through impossible figure eights around a tree.

Nothing was peaceful.

Everything was alive.

Lounging there, I found myself unexpectedly in tears.

The only word that remained was:

Paradise.

Not because life had become perfect.

My dad still has dementia.

I’m still waiting for a biopsy.

There are still uncertainties I cannot solve.

Paradise wasn’t the absence of those things.

It was the complete absence of wanting a moment to be anything other than what it is.

Reality is always revealing itself this way.

Not all at once.

Not loudly.

But in layers.

Like changing light moving across the same landscape.

Nothing below the clouds had changed.

Only the light.

Only my seeing.

Sometimes life doesn’t ask us to find a new world.

Sometimes it simply invites us to look at the one we’re already standing in long enough for another layer to reveal itself.

What changed today that wasn’t the world—but the light by which you were seeing it?