Late April Light

There is a quality of light in late April that I have no adequate word for.

Not the tentative light of early spring that apologizes for itself and retreats before evening.

This is bolder. Gold in the afternoon in a way that makes ordinary things beautiful without warning: the fence, the puddle, the neighbor's cat on the step.

I stood in it today for a moment and could not account for the feeling — something between gratitude and grief, the ache of beauty, the way loveliness sometimes arrives too full to hold without spilling.

I think this is what worship is: not manufactured emotion but the honest response to something genuinely lovely.

The light is lovely. The One who made it is lovelier still.

Stand in it.