A Fragment of Beauty

...first the sky gathered like a covering above us. It had been clear. Clear and sunny. It seemed like a summer morning, a holiday morning.

Then, when everything darkened, the earth, and our yard became like a pantry. Only their little voices with crystal bells still opened the windows of the zenith.

Then the downpour began. It lashed the earth millimeter by millimeter. They fell silent obediently, as if in a marvelous nest. They took their little chairs and sat peacefully on the edge of the porch, next to the small wooden steps. They were silent. Them, them silent?! Indeed. God's downpour on earth had silenced them. They looked like two tiny old men-children escaped through a crack in time onto our porch. They too gazed into the distance, one small on a big chair... the other big on a small chair...

Then everything fell silent. The rain subsided in pauses and swaying, and everything turned into recollection... Of thoughts, of emotions, of memories... A kind of rain with a soul, that was now raining within.

For a few scraps of time, I set aside the daily worry and sat down on the porch too. How strange... Sometimes I live so intensely that I don't know if space becomes internal or if I pour myself into the air of the moment. I only know that I identify. With the moment, which becomes eternity, with space, which is alive and full of Spirit, with the fullness. But especially with You...Who art everywhere and fulfillest all things...

The rain holds me in its lap on a bench and runs its fingers through my hair like a great-grandmother with gnarled, hardworking hands. It keeps telling a story that has lasted for several hundred years, yes, it spins a tale with meanings and feelings not yet translated from the ancient language of silence. I am silent, it spins the distaff of silence within me...

The children are already sharing pancakes, Măriuca is a generous sister who treats everyone. There's already a big commotion around, I don't even know when they finished being well-behaved – and it couldn't have been any other way! Every second they shout at me, Sasha, the little dog, has also nestled, hunched over, so we wouldn't notice her, on the porch, Agnis, the lamb that escaped from a story into our yard, is also curling up on the woolen rug.

But within me, the rain still spins... unwinds, in tireless drops, the distaff from the secular tales of silence... I watch them with my heart, at the core of their being as children of God.

Maria Tudor

Photograph by Andreea Stanciu