It was a beautiful downtown day, that temperature that is just perfect… not hot and not cool, and no need for a jacket.

We walk, as the song goes, on the sunny side of the street. Need that Vitamin D and despite the wackos saying the sun is killing us and will kill all of us someday billions of years from now, I’m generally pro-sun – especially in the winter and spring. In the scripture typology, the sun is the type of God’s grace and light and mercy, so I like to turn my face to it, eyes closed, and feel the warmth on my skin.

What is it to feel the grace and mercy and forgiveness of God? And the sun… we don’t worship it or make it an idol, God forbid… it’s a mental trigger, a physical manifestation that only minutely, and in only the prescribed context, represents a spiritual reality. It is an image of the thing, and not the thing itself. Fallen man, the most prominent and egregious idolater, has always in some form or fashion worshipped the sun. This, a great theologian once said, is the most plausible idolatry.

I don’t worship the sun, though I appreciate it and what it represents, just as I don’t treat a picture of my wife like it is my wife. Somehow, I’ve spun off the story. Let’s get back to it.

Weeds are now invading downtown through the cracks in the sidewalk, pests, though some of them are weed-flowers and therefore get an exemption from our genocidal hatred. One weed-flower comes up through some tiny fissure in the cement and its flower is yellow and quite pretty, and Danielle points out that the image is ready-made for a meme, and I say “Yep. Life finds a way.” But like most memes, it is false even though it makes us feel good. Life most certainly does not find a way. Asparagus never finds a way. Not in a tiny micro-fissure in the concrete of downtown.

It is a Sunday and the traffic is light and most of the businesses are closed. Walking by Fuzzy’s Tacos people are sitting on the patio, laughing, and the music is playing. And walking on, the music fades as we stroll until we get in front of the gym on Center Avenue and then there is music again. And then that fades too. There is the sound of traffic, but it is far enough away. The breezes ruffle the leaves in Coursey Park, swirling softly. We see the results of it, but, like the sun, we can feel it on our skin.

The breeze, in scripture typology, is said to be like the Spirit of God (John 3:8) and this isn’t a sermon, but if you have eyes to see and ears to hear and skin to feel then the creation is a sermon.

It was a Halcyon Day.

We don’t use that term much anymore, but I thought I’d help you help me bring it back into vogue.

A Halcyon Day is a calm, peaceful day. And that minimalistic definition just touches the very surface of what the term fully means.

A Halcyon is a kind of bird in Greek legend that builds itself a floating nest that rides on the ocean as the bird hatches its offspring. According to the Greeks, when the Halcyon sits on her nest floating in the sea, the sea becomes calm for two weeks, and this is just around the time of the winter solstice.

From this phenomenon, mythical or not, comes the term Halcyon Days. I would describe it to my children in this way… “These are the days, when you and your environment are calm and at peace, and later, much later, years later – despite all of your losses and pains and sufferings of life – you will have certain days and feelings (sometimes just the impressions of those days) that stay with you. Even if you are in a prison or on your deathbed, you will close your eyes and you will remember this feeling of calm respite, and the sun on your skin, and the breeze touching the leaves of the trees and rustling softly, like God’s own mercy.”

You know them now that I’ve told you about them.

For me it is standing on a bluff above an ocean so endlessly blue and perfect, white waves cresting, and Perth off to my left and Fremantle there, off in the distance down the coast, jutting out into the blue of the ocean, white boats with sails lined up in a marina, and it just cool enough to need a hoodie.

It is a jungle in Central America, insufferably hot, and then the downpour comes and it is almost instantly cool and there are no bugs, and the breeze is perfect.

It is looking out over a fresh field of our wheat, hand sown, green now and waving gently as the breezes touch it, recent rains made the soil black, and down past the fence, a sea of green and there a windmill sticking up out of it and feeding a stock tank with God’s water.

And it is this walk downtown, weeds coming up through the cracks, a perfect flower and the wife of my youth by my side still, after all these years.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.