Gradient of Grace

It is very hard to sit still lately. I've been out on the back porch watching the sunset for the last little while, fighting the urge to 'do something useful'.  Fredrick Buechner says in A Room Called Remember that it's hard to sit in that quiet room and look yourself in the face, to look God in the face, harder than most anything else to let there be room for remembering. 

But I'm trying to pay attention to what is in front of me and let God say something, not that he must say anything at all. Though certainly is the God who speaks, he isn't afraid of silence like I am tonight. 

I don't hear much besides the frogs and the exchange of long shushes along the road nearby as cars pass each other. I do see the slow descent of the day. It is a calm graceful gradient against the stark black edges of the trees. They stand like charred nervous systems while hung in the background is the huge enveloping clarity of the deep lowering blue, constant and unharried and good.