Divining

Jan - July 2025 Wandering Archive

A New Spillway

Sometimes when I’m writing, I find myself wondering how far back I need to go just to tell one story. What’s the starting point where everything was once connected? When was the thread I’m pulling now knotted to something decades old?

There are moments when the things I fabricate feel less strange or powerful than the things that actually happened. And so the temptation rises: to spill everything, from the beginning to now... To name each flicker and fracture, every kindness and cruelty. Because how do I know which pieces were formative, and which were just scenery? How do I choose which echoes to follow?

I used to turn the people in my life into stories-- to reshape them into characters I could understand, versions of them that fit on the page. It made things cleaner, digestible, and perhaps more controlled... but ultimately in the pursuit of meaning and adventure, as much as escape was a happy side-effect. And for a time, it worked. But my current novel… this one started that way and then outgrew it. It's found its own voice, though still uses my breath.

What's more, inside of me, from where the font flows, there has been laid my final tender pieces of the dam that pain and pragmatism have bid me build. It was not my will, but the will of another that spoke to me in a dream and gave me peace, though it still tastes bittersweet... But this is part of another, longer tale. Suffice to say now that the constant bleeding that was once at least useful for debridement after the initial flood, has been staunched. I can now place the modest spillway for my divine mead to overflow... appropriately. God willing, it may now be harnessed without danger of falling in.

 

Days of Thirst

Today I felt the pull of an old echo; a song, a self I used to know. I stood at the edge of memory, where old comforts and old confusions dwell. There was beauty in it, still. But also a faint ache, like the way incense clings to fabric long after the fire has gone out. Likewise, there is a plant in me that never died, only grew quiet beneath the surface. Now, in this new season, it presses upward, slow and shy, and not rebellious, but reaching.

The world is full of marvels, and to love God is not to shut our eyes against them, but to love more deeply, more carefully, more wholly. I do not want to hollow out my heart for the sake of safety. I want it to be tender, yes. But also full.

The faith I’ve inherited is precious, but sometimes parched. I see so many saints speak of freedom, but live as though joy were suspect. As though beauty were bait for sin. As though mystery were simply indulgence. But I remember the wine at Cana, and the tears at Lazarus' tomb. 

Even so, I wrestle with sorrow. With suffering. With the fragile, fierce truth of free will-- that somehow, it is a good thing even when we choose to use it for bad reasons. God lets bad things happen because it's a consequence of us having free will. And so, God allows aching paths. Love must be chosen. 

 

A Reason to Return

For so long, I’ve been defining myself by the service to or protection of others. It is exhausting work that makes my solitude bearable only by comparison. 

Shield raised, eyes forward. Watching, seeking, seeking understanding... But then someone finally said it aloud:

“You’ve been protecting people your whole life, Theozete.”

And those words landed like rainfall on dry earth, because I knew them to be true, not just in the sense of confirmation, but in some ways, too, exasperation, and the necessity of their expiration. But the thing is, I hardly know how to live any other way. I hardly desire to. I have only ever wished to serve that which is greater than me for the sake of raising what is lesser. But this is the fallacy-- assuming that I am not also lesser, simply by communion or vocation. There is no greater or lesser in Christ. And so I was reminded, too, that despite my desires I am not just spirit and will, but I am flesh. And it is even deeper in this idea that I was also reminded of something I hadn't realised I'd forgotten-- that my body is not my burden, she is my beloved other half. That I deserve love too. That the care I give myself need not be simple rationed maintenance to avoid misfortune and malfunction, but out of the abundance of love I wish still to give to others, and will not diminish simply by being apportioned to me, as well. 

So today I become prodigal husband to my own body-- not as owner, but as keeper. Not to fix her, but to hold her. As I have carried in heart and mind, she has carried me.. quietly, patiently, often waiting to be seen as more than a vehicle. What a shame, to have forsaken stewardship for dominion over what God has given me. 

And so... this may seem the most meandering entry, I'm sure, but the end of it is this: that though I have spent my life keeping myself strong or healthy or simply functioning for others, I realise now that I can also live for myself. Also. That my own existence has enough inherent value and worthiness for love than any other, and that my existence need not be validated by another. I may travel on simply for the pleasure of doing so. I may rest, God willing, if I desire. I may seek, God willing, as I desire. And Only He knows the end. 

 

A Cottage Clearing

There was an impulse this morning, as gentle as the supplications of a gentle hand upon one's sleeve. There was no trumpet call or prophetic wind, but an urging to stop walking, if for a moment, and let the path grow soft around me. To make a place for myself. 

Following the river as I've done for some days, I found a small clearing, a little above a small lake... something little more than a pond, but mirror-clear and dotted with patches of reeds where fish swam below and insects flocked above. A sign I'd not seen before told me I was not far from a village-- perhaps a morning’s walk, if someone wished to find me or if I wished to go. But far enough to be my own without hassle. 

As God would have it, there was a half-standing cottage already there, tucked among birch trees and old stones. A far cry-- a miraculously stark difference, in fact, from the desert I'd found myself in before. I still had sand in my shoes. 

I cleared it slowly, and deliberately. The old vines came off willingly, though less so the shrubs that grew through the floor. I left a few wildflowers untouched at the door. 

Inside, I placed my few things, given no explanation for what this place would become for me, if anything. I only felt the deep knowing that for now, I was meant to dwell-- Not to rebuild the whole world, or answer every call, but simply to sit, and listen. 

If there is something here to learn, then I’ll stay until it teaches me something.

 

Wounded Glory

Today I wept; not from despair, but from the ache of contact.

I have been seen, I have been known, and I have been loved, but today I felt a taste of the hope of belonging... and what a horror it was. 

I had thought that to feel at home might mean safety, or that to belong might finally mean peace, but hope is not soft-- it is sharp, edged with risk. Risk of vulnerability that I wonder if I can afford again. And to love is to be touched by something that enriches, even after it has long gone, and yet, to get it one must be vulnerable, even in the knowledge that it can utterly break you, too. 

I suppose the weight of its shadow is a symbol of its value. But all things that are claimed or acknowledged can be taken away. All things that are found, can be lost. And so to be found is no small or comforting thing, even when it can be the one thing we might dare hope for. 

 

The Snow Chamber

Today, in a dream, I came upon a great wooden church, tucked away in the dark wood, but warm and orange within. Red, even. I was greeted there by a man who showed me where I could stay, and would be doing work for him. I put down my belongings beside the bed, but as we continued to chat something drew me to another door beside the other entrance, quiet and dark. I asked about it, offhand. My guide smiled, "Oh, there’s nothing in there."

Still, he walked with me, and I pulled on the door to find that inside, the air was colder. Snow blanketed the threshold and beyond, where it shouldn't, and at first I could see nothing but darkness above the drift. He walked in first, and I kicked at the snow by my feet to reveal mosaic tiles below. The space began to bloom with light as I walked in, and found that it wasn't a small room or exit at all, but an enormous hall. It was high-ceilinged and old... wounded, but glorious. Up, almost higher than the light could reach, it became clear that the snow had accumulated on account of a large hole in the roof. 

I stood in the middle of that ancient hush and said, almost to myself, "I will fix this."

My companion laughed, gently. Not at me, I think, but at the enormity of the task. Perhaps at my naiveté.  And yet, he did not discourage me, he started to tell me stories about the room, and what used to happen there in some bygone era. And as he spoke, children came running in, as if they had been passing by in play and stumbled upon the open door like I did. They played in the snow, but then they began to listen to the stories too. They asked me, with wide eyes, if I really intended to fix it. And somehow, even without knowing how, I said yes.

Bread, Water, and the Spoonful of Sugar

There is a bedrock under my feet, where there wasn't before. It is the answer to my groundless but hopeful prayers some year ago now, at the end of my previous life. Faith. Scripture. Christ. These things that are simple and profound, and on which all things are sustained on top of that rock. 

Since my conversion, I’ve known their weight and power. I’ve drunk from the stillness of God. I’ve walked, when I've been fortunate, with the hero of heroes that is Christ. Led by the Spirit, I have moved with love, through chaos... But lately, I’ve begun to remember something that I once held loosely... I remember something that existed before all the structure, before I threw myself into the doctrines that etched themselves into the rock, too: Was this bedrock was meant to be the whole world? Surely not-- it is what we build on, not the end. It is the beginning.

There was a time when stories, myths, and symbols moved something in me that raw truth could not. The magic wasn’t false, it was experience made real. It was, if I can give a silly example, that "spoonful of sugar" that "turned bread and water into tea and cakes." It did change the substance, but by making the encounter more palatable. 

I think that’s what I’m recovering now, in the moment of breath after having held it for so long. My journey into academics and dogma has been a slight departure from what I know in my soul, admittedly, but has also deepened my own understanding in the ways I'd hoped in my eventual return to what inspires what I know.

The awe. That.. texture and hue of the imaginative. 

The beauty that reminds me why the truth matters in the first place.

There is a part of me that resists, now, though... A part that fears the sweetness may become too much, too distracting, too sentimental. But this is fleeting, and I feel strongly that deeper truth is that God so loved the world, that he gave his son to protect it. To do the job that we are supposed to do for it and each other in our human lives. There is beauty in this world, in this life that we are meant to live. There is life in story, and truth is found deep in myth. God is in all of these things, nourishing us on levels that we flawed humans may understand and imbibe for our betterment-- not meant to be worshiped, but walked with, where life's great colours varieties give the rock its purpose, and incarnation its meaning.