Once I saw the air spin and I thought it was proof of God. I felt God Himself.

We lived, my family, on an 80-acre farm south of Saugerties, in a 200-year-old stone farmhouse. We often lazed and talked and ate outside, between the twin maples, titans with four foot diameter trunks, planted by the devout long ago.

We sat one summer evening at the picnic table I crafted from hand-hewn, century-old wagon timbers. Before me were piles of homegrown tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and corn. I sorted and cleaned a basket of dense basil, spindly dill, stalked garlic. My daughters -- then 17, 2, and 3 months -- were splendid distractions. My wife, with one free hand, was picking bits of dirt from the rootlets of fresh-pulled green onions, for the slow satisfaction of it, brushing away the debris after each one. In her blanketed lap the baby dozed, the dark fuzz on her tender crown glinting red, grazed by a settling sun.

My oldest, her little sister tucked under an arm, rocked in the freestanding knotted-rope hammock, pushing one foot against the trunk of the nearby maple, talking nonsense and tease. The little one reached up and finger-flipped at the lower lip above her, and then they both did it, each to the other: flibber, blidder, blibber.

Tiny spots of white floated and missed each other in the heat, over the whole of the front 30-acres, a valley of ripened wheat, with doublet ponds perched on the far side's rise. Beyond, the stone steeple of a rural Dutch Reform church rose up. Built in the 1700s, it was the only human gesture emerging from the waves of ever-more-blue ridge tops, undulating to the Hudson.

Those white spots were alive in the windless air. Some were gnats and moths, others pollen, most of it mysterious, aimless spoor. The spindrift of growth and life itself, of 84 degrees and limpid humidity. Blurring the landscape, and yet a pin-dot atomizing of the visible world before us, both at once. The palest parts of existence, they seemed; so small, light enough to rise, but unable to escape.

Cicadas buzzed, frogs from the ponds monotonized, electric blue needles whirred around us, fly-bys of crackling paper. Everything teemed in the gold of near-sundown; a singular day of summer. The world was warm to the skin, my children moved and talked and laughed. My heart was at ease. Such joy.

It took years to reduce the ecstatic fever of what happened next, to release the deep inhale I took that evening of a Perfect Sacred Love.

There was no breeze, but as I turned, over my shoulder, a swirl of last year's leaves coned up, slow, from under the porch, and defined a perfect spiral, to the eaves of the house, and paused, a graceful dispensation at the end. I felt a kind of sizzle, along my legs, between my shoulders. My  breath caught. God.

I turned back and looked at all of them and widened my scope, a trick I learned for drawing and painting, to remind myself to consciously see more, to see all, periphery and center, above and below, in order to compose. I saw the All of them: Deborah, Molly, Roxanne, Eliana, each lovely, hands in motion and smiles like rhythms; the world beyond them, red and green and gold; All framed by the shifting limits of my vision and will and intention.

My heart beat faster. The leaves drifted up, or away, or down, the geometry gone. The last of them continued, uncertain, on a flight that followed the lift in my heart.

My family did not see what I saw, but my need for my beloveds was now the All of All, was the slow fading heat itself, pulsing with my pulse, as One with the moths and lacewings, one with the holy water of the air that settled down and rose upon us, and made of us one pulse, one breath, one life, one family on a hill, merely alive, caressed by the singular torus of God.

I held this one event, a vortex of debris on a summer evening, long after Faith left me, as my only remaining evidence. After the Christianity of youth, of tender Jesus-loves-me, cracked apart, dead and bloody, under my Believer father's fists. After years of college Kundalini left me disciplined, flexible, and breath-conscious, but unfulfilled. After a weekend at a monastery and the precipice, the abyss, of Catholicism. After heartfelt  conversion to Judaism and years of concentrated, wishful Torah study.

After the abrasion of self-doubt, after the setting aside of salvation, eternity, and the pretense of heaven, this odd earthly breath ascending before my kitchen door remained in me. This to me was God.

But after many years, I let this go, too. Not all of it, just the All of it. No longer God, just the inevitable human idea of  somehow, somwhere, a god.

And just plain grace. Just a lovely and unforgettable moment, the presence of my family, the movement of air. It was no longer personal attention paid to me, or a blessing by any One, but nontheless an extraordinary event I could not explain in anything but heart language.

The vestiges were the last thing to die in me, a yearning, for an All. And then that faded away.

What remains is just a kind of secular sacred, but still so beautiful, so inherent to me, it outweighs two suicides and four surgeries and my sold-away home. I was for-real homeless once, and I have lost three painstaking libraries, and my Nana died alone, but this one memory un-leavens the pain of those and all else; they cannot rise to devour me: shh, settle, the heart is only so durable, the voice of the air whispers to me.  Simple gifts: Remember joy. Let it rest.

I feel it all still as I always have. I still get holy, just not Holy. I still get sublime. I just don't surrender.

And I still get an endless devotion to Good and Right and True, to Hard Work and Justice and Endure. They are elevated in me, by me, to as high as plain life allows. Values lifted up, preserved, not as high as heaven, not as lofty as God, but always nearby, circling me, in me and through me. Ever moving, stirred, by my intention, and raised up from the ordinary dirt of simply What We Do and What Happens Next by a love that powers human nobility, to urge on us What We Allow and What We Give.

Love elevates these virtues in me. Love moves in me like an unnameable ziz suffusing over and through blue-green wheat. Over and around and in me, in us, in all of our beloveds, in fact and in memory. Because I choose it. I want it in me, because love makes more love, joy more joy, and lovingkindness eases our suffering.

In sickness and in health, beside the still waters, lying down in green pastures, but in a world that will end.

amen.