Lightening flashes, red from distance, red from dust. It’s night and I’m driving home after a 14 hour day, a long day. It flashes 15 maybe 20 miles away, the storm flying off to inundate some other desert land, but not here.

Cars zip past my truck, desperate to get home to their beautiful expensive houses and their beautiful expensive wives and their perfect expensive children. We pass each other neither knowing or caring who the other is in that car.

But there’s the lightening in the distance. Do they see the beauty? Do they see this magical moment, this stupendous flash of energy arcing through the sky a dozen miles away? What is wrong with us? Why don’t we stop? Why don’t we cry at that wondrous event?

We have errands to run and other moments to notice.

Charles Mingus and his band play the soundtrack for this time. The merlot I had earlier after a couple of hours of making pasta for a few hundred people is starting to sink in, it’s playing tricks with my mind, I’m seeing this moment of exquisit magnificence and simultaneous nothingness as a commentary on human life. Mundane beats spectacular. Trite beats meaning.

No one sees this moment? This storm playing on the horizon as the as moments of sunlight fade to darkness, as Charles Mingus wails, as the headlights tear through the night? No one else sees this?

Nothing so lonely as beauty unshared.