Seeing Through a Glass Darkly

I’m sitting with my fingers posed above keys, my eyes locked on the cotton flying about the street just outside the window. Bits of fluff, dodging cars and leaping through branches, and then, before my eyes, a girl. The tips of her hair are white. The white bleeds upward into purple. The purple becomes white again. She is standing on the other side of the glass, eyes locked with mine but she is seeing only a mirror. With a wrinkle to her nose she reaches up to tip her hat just a fraction of an angle. It is a wide-rimmed Amish-styled hat, black felt and quite out of its home of origin. The cotton dust clings and she flicks it away. She frowns, then smiles, and bends the rim of the hat toward the sky.

I bid her to look deeper. Look through the reflection and see me, sitting here, looking right into her eyes. Wouldn’t that be a funny moment? What might she feel? What might I?

Everything is spiritual in these moments to me; cotton dust and glass that darkens and mirrors we can’t see through even though invitation presses.  We see through a glass darkly. We look into what is real beyond but see only our own reflection. We miss what is on the other side. We miss the eyes staring right back into our own.

“We know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfect completeness comes, the partial will pass away… Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”