I am walking along Santa Cruz’s West Cliff Drive, taking in the Pacific Ocean early one morning, when I see sunlight glimmering through an archway the churning water has carved out of the stony bluff. I have passed this natural bridge countless times, but the dancing light now beckons me. I pause to take it in, leaning against a wooden fence and resting my elbows on its weathered top rail.
Sea lions bark and bluster out on Seal Rock. A cormorant bobs in the roiling backwash, unworried by the sharp edges of rock around it as the waves pound the shore, scattering gulls who circle skyward, their cries piercing the calm. The foam is brilliant white against the opaque, blue-green water. One outsized wave surges over a stone table, slams into the bluff and mists my face with its bracing chill.
The cool air carries the low-tide smell of the abundant life thriving in the brine. I fill my lungs with it and exhale slowly. Still the rising sun shimmers on the sea beyond the archway. I long to pass through this portal and lose myself in the dazzling light.
Then a car screeches to a stop behind me, startling me from my reverie. I turn around and see it’s nothing — a Subaru has narrowly avoided rear-ending a rattly Volkswagen van that is now chuffing away. But the spell has been broken. A lone cloud crawls over the sun, turning the sea flat gray. Such moments of ineffable beauty keep sneaking up on me but never seem to last. And once they’re gone, I’ve found, there’s no getting them back.
I recall a lazy afternoon from my childhood when for once I had sole control of the only television in the house. I relished the freedom of turning back and forth between channels until I stumbled upon Lost Horizon, a black-and-white film made in 1937. I was drawn into the story of the hero, Robert Conway, a plane crash survivor who discovers a hidden passage to a paradise called Shangri-La. He falls in love with an enchanting woman, a plot turn that even I, a boy of 9 or 10, knew was inevitable from the moment she stepped into the story. All is well until, for some boneheaded reason I no longer recall, Conway feels compelled to return to the real world. I stood in front of the TV, fists clenched in anguish, imploring him not to go back with every step he took toward home. Sure enough, when he tries to return, the passageway has vanished. A sense of loss broke over me, and I puddled into despair on our living room floor.
Standing before the archway, I feel the same ache for the ethereal light that has vanished from the surface of the cold, gray sea. Mine seems a universal longing. Hidden portals to magical worlds fill the stories we tell: the wardrobe to Narnia, the bridge to Brigadoon, Alice’s rabbit hole. Something deep in our souls knows that a truer reality exists beyond our day-to-day, because once in a while the tired fabric of the world gives way and an otherworldly beauty brushes up against us. The veil is lifted, the wonder revealed, a wonder that is not of this world yet seems the fulfillment of all this world might be.
C.S. Lewis calls these moments “drippings of grace,” when we feel we have discovered our place at last: Ah, we say, so this is what I was made for. Mystery reveals a bit of itself. It quickens our souls’ memory of Eden, where all was set right, and offers a foretaste of heaven, where all will be restored. But the beauty of the moment is impossible to hold. It is “not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand,” Lewis writes, “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
How I ache for all that has been lost; how I yearn for all that is to come. Goethe calls this yearning a “blessed longing” to lose oneself in the beauty, to “flame toward death” in hallowed light like a “moth burnt to nothing” in a candle’s flame.
But the secret passageway is gone. For now, I have only these visitations of wonder, stirring a longing in me that was awakened when I stood in front of the TV, begging that foolish man to stay in paradise. For now, whenever beauty takes its leave, I can only pray it will reveal itself again soon.
The ocean stretches from one end of the horizon to the other. A residue of wonder clings to it, its vastness hints at secrets yet to be revealed. I soak in the warmth of the sun, just another star hung within a universe that holds, the astronomers tell us, 300 sextillion of them. Eleven regal pelicans glide by in single file, skimming along the surface between two waves. They catch an updraft, one after the other, rising over the bluff and sailing up the coast without the beat of a single wing. Each one seems a miracle soaring its way through this everyday world, a whispered hope that a time is coming when I will find my way back to Shangri-La, a moth burnt to nothing, ablaze in holy light.
Bruce Lawrie lives in Scotts Valley, California. His work has appeared in Portland Magazine, Mockingbird, The Best Spiritual Writing 2011, Fathom, U.S. Catholic and elsewhere.