◎ A Moment

I hope you are having a good morning, dearest reader. My entries have been heavier lately but I'm going to continue this trend because there are lots of things flowing now from deep places, and I want to share this experience I had this morning. 

I've been 37 for a week now, and in case you were wondering, it does not feel very different from when I was 33, specifically, but it does feel different now than any time before that, for very special reasons. Not long ago, I was one woman in five parts: A heart that was five, a will that was twelve, and a mind that was twenty-one, all separate from each other and my soul-- the ageless "I", all being dragged along inside a beaten-up automaton powered by a pilot light. And now I feel very different.

Some years ago, God put a nice big chasm between me and my previous life, such that most of my memories now are filed away in a place where they can be called when referenced but generally have no bearing on my current state. I want to say somewhere in dusty old cabinets but no... I don't store them-- they are in the cloud, so to speak. 

This morning again I woke up in a strange state of lucidity, where there is no fog but still limited clarity. Less like being surrounded by forest, or greyness, and more like simply having a near-sightedness. I feel, existentially, like the little yellow man in Google Street-view. Life is... slower again, and the yoke is light, but the coursework, in and out of school, remains heavy.  

I felt upon waking, like... All that I was holding in my clenched teeth or fists, is now before me, separate from me, so that it might be observed. It is not out of reach, if I should do so... My life was flashing before my eyes, if you will. Like everything needed to catch up. My brain was... downloading. Touching everything being knit together by the dexterous tendrils of the Ageless I.

And for a moment, I was so steeped in this knitting that I lost touch of direction. There was no pull or reaching in any direction of my soul. I simply floated in it all, as if on a sea. And I even lost my Why. A hill appeared in my thoughts, as if out of the water and I thought... why? Why bother? And it was not a sad, defeated question, it was simply a matter of fact. Why climb the hill? I knew I had to-- that was the only thing that was clear. I was faced with a law, without a God to have given it; and I knew, I know, I always have the option of walking away.

And I thought... Maybe that's why we run sometimes... Because that's the only way we can feel in control. 

Because, we live in a world; we are not the world. Because we live in a world where even when we are sad, birds will chirp and the sun will shine. We can celebrate in the storm, and the colours of the world do not change around us based on our ability, or not, to see them. We are all irrelevant, in this respect. Like sound waves, all things, in their different times and speeds, will ripple outward and fade away, so that they exist only in memory. 

But from this little spot of lucidity, my brain was inclined to ask something like, "Where is God in this?" but I knew immediately that that was a stupid question. The question that really should be asked, and I did, was not "Where is God?" but, "Where was/am I?"

...

The answer I came up with, was thusly dictated (and punctuated later):

I think that the answer to that, is that I, too, have always been here… Just… Disassembled over time, so that at the deepest parts, it didn't seem like I was. And my consciousness was broken between the pieces I mentioned above, so that the gaps corresponded with whatever piece I was leaning on to survive, at a given time. But as these pieces have come together, there are now no gaps… Like a stained glass window that has a complete picture, where once wind blew through. 

One of my favourite pictures from my earlier blogs is the one where there is a sleeping statue woman on one side, and glass on the other side. I feel like it was a nice depiction artistically of how I felt at the time. It was dramatic and colorful, and it had movement to it.

But I don't feel that way now, either… I feel like all that broken glass has been transformed-- not unlike a little wooden puppet who becomes a real boy... Artifice... transfigured by love. And this is nothing short of miraculous. I've seen it so many times that people do not get to where I am right now-- and this is not a hierarchical or prideful statement… The world is so full of brokenness, and I consider this to be a privileged position. I'm sure that many others have felt this way, across the world, of course, when they finally feel healed by Jesus. But... something about saying that, for this situation, feels a little bit off… Because I feel like this is less about being healed by Jesus, and more about actually fitting or expanding into the shape that was already prepared for me, but I had to allow myself to grow into. The edges of the puzzle were already there. I just didn't have all of the pieces... or something.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever it was that God has been trying to do in my person... it feels completed. An instar, like. My life is not over but... but also it is. Like a butterfly that first started as a little worm, eating, and eating, and eating, then turns itself into goo, within the confinements of a hard shell, unrecognisable, deconstructed, and swimming and its own viscera... It emerges something very different than the way it went in, though somehow one could also argue that it was never meant to come out any different way, either. And the butterfly is given a very different task than the one that ate, and the one that wriggled.

...

... Dearest reader... When I eventually fly, will it be the most natural thing in the world?