Evening Epiphany

I saw a burning bush this evening – well, I think it was a callery pear tree, actually, but one of Mayor Bloomberg’s Million Tree initiative, in any case.  And, truth be told, it was no more in danger of being consumed than Moses’s bush was.  Holy ground?  Well perhaps; the street where I live, anyway.

It was a dreary, grey day in New York today, and it was dark and drizzling as I turned down my block, heading for home and dinner.  I was almost to the turn into the courtyard of our building when I stopped dead in my tracks.  The lamplight glistering off the soaked trees had turned the bare branches into a net of flame, a cage of glowing filigree around the orb of the light itself.  I stood stock-still in the rain, transfixed.  A few steps to either side on the pavement, and I would never have seen it.  But there it was, and there I was.

It wasn’t the Bible that first popped into my mind, though.  It was a phrase from Shakespeare, from one of Hamlet’s soliloquies, made famous in my youth when it was borrowed for one of the songs in Hair:  “fretted with golden fire.”  (Though, of course, there have been those who thought Shakespeare was God.)

And, no, I did not remove my commuting sneakers to stand soggily in my socks on the wet pavement.  Still.  It was a reminder that epiphanies and beauty go unnoticed all around us, a multi-verse of wonder that, unlike those of string-theory physicists, require no need of higher math to grasp (thankfully).  All we need to do is walk with open eyes.