She stopped in the middle of the supermarket.
This was not planned. She'd been on her way to the bread aisle, distracted, running through the list in her head, doing the thing you do in supermarkets which is move through them without seeing them.
And then something made her stop.
The light.
The particular quality of the light in the cereal aisle at four o'clock on a Wednesday in November. Fluorescent and strange and falling on the boxes in a way that was, objectively speaking, just supermarket light — but that, if you stopped and actually looked at it, was also something else. A quality of light that was doing what light does, which is illuminate, and in illuminating, reveal.
She stood and looked at the light on the cereal boxes.
A woman with a trolley moved around her with a polite expression.
She looked at the light for another thirty seconds.
She wasn't sure what she was looking at. She wasn't sure what had changed. The light was the same light it had been ten seconds earlier, before she'd stopped. But she was looking at it differently. She was seeing it, which is different from the light just being there while she passed through it.
She went to the bread aisle.
She thought about the light for several days.
She started noticing light more often. Not analysing it. Not making it mean anything. Just stopping, occasionally, to actually look at what was in front of her.
Ordinary things, seen truly.
Extraordinary, every time.
The sacred is in the ordinary. You just have to stop and look.
