A Blessing for the Seen and Unseen

 Bless the last aspen leaf, trembling at the tip of its skeletal branch, a golden ember refusing to fade, a banner of quiet defiance against the pull of time. May it linger a little longer, caught in the delicate dance between surrender and persistence, bearing witness to the slow turning of the seasons.

Bless gravity, that unseen and faithful keeper, embracing alike the feather and the mountain, the drifting seed and the falling star. It holds the rivers to their courses and the planets to their dance, yet it also draws your beloved’s body close to yours, pressing skin to skin, heart to heart, until longing dissolves into warmth.

Bless the one who turned away, the one who could not hold your love, for they, too, were cradling a sorrow too vast to bear. Bless the ache that settled in their absence, for in its hollow chambers, something new is stirring—a tenderness shaped by loss, a knowing that love, even unreturned, is never wasted.

Bless the improbable confluence of moments that led to you—to your breath, your hands, your quiet laughter in the dark. Across endless tides of chance and change, across the collision of stars and the weaving of bloodlines, you emerged, singular and unrepeatable. You are the bright note that rose above the cacophony of what could have been and never was.

Bless time, that patient sculptor, that unmaker and remaker of all things. For though it is ruthless in its passage, though it gathers all things into the hush of what-has-been, it also gifts each moment its radiance. It let the aspen leaf glow for a little while longer. It carved out this brief interlude between the vast silence of not-yet and never-again, and in that interval, we love, we ache, we marvel.

Bless the stranger whose passing glance, whose fleeting smile, carried an echo of someone long gone, as if time folded in on itself for just an instant to remind you that love, once given, does not vanish. That some part of what we cherish is always making its way back to us in the form of a hand we do not expect to hold, a voice we do not expect to hear again, a face that is both known and unknown.

Bless the grains of sand that once lay silent on the ocean floor, now reborn as the glass through which we peer into the distance—the lens that brings into focus the cormorant’s gleaming eye, the distant nebula, the words on a yellowed page. For in the act of seeing, we draw the faraway near, and in the act of reading, we allow a voice, long silenced, to speak once more.

Bless the knowing that dwells in all things—the seed that unfurls into the golden geometry of a sunflower, the instinct that turns the swallow south before the first frost, the quiet resolve in the human heart that rises even when the world burns, even when the weight of sorrow bends the spine.

Bless paper, that tender keeper of our longing, our revolutions, our whispered dreams. May it endure long after the circuits fail, long after the fragile empires of data crumble, holding safe the poetry and prayers that once carried us through the dark.

Bless the small delights that tether us to the present—the crisp bounce of a table tennis ball, the boyish gleam in an old man’s eyes as he sets his cane aside to play, the way laughter can still rise, unbidden, like a sparrow startled into flight.

Bless blue—the blue of the bird in flight and the sky it disappears into, the blue of the morning sea, the hush of twilight settling into indigo. For it is the color of longing, of memory, of distance, and yet it is also the color of presence, of the here and now.

Bless consciousness, that fragile and wondrous thing, which makes blue different to me than it is to you, which allows each of us to wander through this world with our own private symphonies, our own constellations of meaning.

Bless the invisible forces—the hands that shape music from silence, the mathematics that lend weight to a single vote, the unseen threads that weave order from chaos, making of this world something not just inhabitable, but beautiful.

Bless the clouds, those drifting messengers, shifting and vanishing, glowing gold in the last light of evening. They remind us that all things are passing, and yet, in their brief and luminous existence, they make the sky more lovely than it would be without them.

I love You,
Alma