Seven Short Stories of Awe

a love letter to the land

Aloha, I’m Ashley. I write about life through the lens of love for creative souls who seek to make life more beautiful. If you find value in the magical and inspiration in the messy middle, subscribe to join the journey. Your footprints will be celebrated.

I.

When I peel my consciousness away from dreams before I’ve even opened my eyes, the morning breeze cools the tip of my nose, and a small smile grows on my lips as the first of you announces the day. I know what’s coming; my smile deepens. 

It starts small, just a whisper in the forest, but it swells.

Layer over layer of good mornings greet me and each other. It’s as though I can see the shape of your sound, and it is spherical. It moves like a murmuration. I imagine myself at the center of it, and I rise like a hot air balloon. The symphony doesn’t last long: five minutes, fifteen? It’s easy to miss. This is why I sleep with the sliding glass door open — it is too adept at blocking sound, and the birds are my most treasured start of the day.

I listen.

There is a feeling of rightness, of wholeness, of hope in this morning ritual. For the birds, it’s innate, for me, it’s a gift that seeps like honey into the crevices of myself and I try to carry that feeling with me through the day.

II.

Sparkle. There is no better word to describe the way sunlight catches the ocean’s surface just so. This dancing, glittering light over an always-moving element mesmerizes—a disintegrated disco ball. Yet, with a single shift of degree, breeze, or cloud, it could disappear. And so I sit, spellbound, marveling at the small beauty created by the collision of unimaginable forces.

III.

The sky is the peach of a Himalayan salt lamp. The arch of the mountain is still purple with shadow. Light at this angle illuminates the dips and rises of landscapes that, in the absence of it, look flat, like paper cutouts. A cloud is two sides of a coin for a moment — gilt and monochrome — before it integrates into a uniform shade. Without ceremony or circumstance, but with the unmistakable imprint of the wondrous, the day turns on.

IV.

How do they cling like that? These tenacious worlds of water. They grip the serrated edge of a rose leaf: each point host to another sphere. They hold fast to the tip of a fern drooping low, suspended over hard ground. They decorate a spider’s web like strings of opalescent pearls. They hold fast, glinting and glimmering and reflecting the world in perfect mirror — tiny, upside-down universes contained within them — then melt away, only to do it again tomorrow.

V.

At this elevation, the ground closes the sky. Clouds trail their tails over the tips of long grasses as though the sky were a bride and the mist her veil. The road cuts a trail between two spheres, and on it, I feel suspended.

VI.

Perhaps it is the clash of dry air and eucalyptus, this scent. Because I most often smell it in Southern California. Occasionally, I’ll catch a whiff in Hawaii in the early morning. Maybe it’s ozone. This scent is dry and crisp, not unlike snow, but greener. It is the smell of new beginning and possibility. It is open and ready. It is the product of unseen alchemy between elements I cannot name.

It is, maybe, something only I notice because historically, when I’ve asked Do you smell that?, I’ve received puzzled looks. But every time I catch it, it delights and surprises me, and I inhale it like a treasured fragrance that is only released for the holidays. 

VII.

When the common plantains bloom in the grass, we leave them. White seed spheres on slender stalks sway and bend with the slightest wind, and the bees who land lightly on them. Standing at the center of calf-high kisses, I am engulfed with the buzz of joyful pollinators.