You Had To Be There

I walked outside to perform a mundane chore
Accomplished a thousand times before
And was struck in the face by transcendence.
I snap some pictures, adjust some settings and try again,
But something is lost in their muted reality.

I wish I were an artist who could put brush to canvas or pen to paper,
To employ the proper techniques to convey in two dimensions
Something hard to capture even in the full presence of the moment:
To project the feeling of an instant,
Immortalizing it in physical space,
So others might feel a reflection of the thing even though the thing itself is gone.

With the naked eye I see a night sky truly breathtaking:
Whose blue is so rich and dark it suggests
Ocean depths rather than the firmament of heaven.
Clouds move visibly across a surface so flat and calm
They look like sheets of ice drifting on the current.
The moon isn't up above;
It's down below, beckoning you to follow
This will o'the wisp down beneath the waves
To a place beyond anything you could dream.

I understand in this moment what it means to feel small yet massive in significance
And why someone would see divinity in the mystery of sky and wave and nature;
Why Thoreau said this world is but a canvas to our imagination.
But the words, like pictures or paintings or any medium of expression, fall short.
We point to the thing itself the best we know how,
But at the end of the day you had to be there.