musings 2006

Somewhere past the habit of concern and outside the hope of dreaming there is a space - azure blue, tinged with silver – a space that is a comfortable peace … or perhaps a peace slightly uneasy. When we come out of a storm, just when the light comes and the winds begin to soften and whisper, there is often a breath of ineffable relief; I made it. I don’t know how I got over, but by Grace, I have. This, I think, is especially true in those short-lived trials of youth, which come in and out like the tide. The joy of escape is matched only by the grayness of the preceding despair.

But as we grow, we find that the exhilaration of this space is short-lived, if indeed it comes at all. This is especially so when the elements of the storm – rains that toss and winds that scar - gain a normalcy like the sunrise. When the storm persists, when the circumstances of pain or confusion or loss or loneliness come to be nothing so much as familiar, out response, I think, is to come to acceptance so that we can maintain at least some semblance of normalcy. Even though we know we’ll perish – we still crave survival.

Of course, we have been reminded, and all too often, that we were never meant to survive, but rather to live… If we are to live the conditions that made survival necessary need to change. But sometimes, sometimes the storm persists. When the storm has become so familiar that it replaces the setting and rising sun as the metric by which we count our days, hours and minutes, then when the storm dies down and the waters recede – our response is not always one of relief. For suddenly we find ourselves without a mooring.

The danger, true enough, has passed. Yet with danger having been all we know – in our newfound freedom we are lost. At pains to feel blessed, still longing for peace. When you’ve become as mal-adjusted as the world, situation and conditions which birthed you – how then are you supposed to operate in well-functioning world?

~Feb 2006