She is standing on her chair, screaming through a rendition of a song I’m sure I might have heard before, but maybe not. Between her monotone and the volume, I can’t make out the words.
He sits next to her, a cape carelessly hanging, about to brush the ground. I can tell by the look on his face that this is not concentration; this is fighting the urge to cover one’s ears.
She gets down off the chair, and we’re halfway through the second rendition. I’ve caught the words ‘Lord’ and ‘holy,’ I think. But I’m still unsure. The volume and pitch have not changed.
He’s suddenly at my elbow.
“Tell her she needs to be quiet,” he says to me. “Kate is sleeping.”
Kate was sleeping. The cache of my own nostalgia broke that right up. Somehow, Kate had woken up.
I feel like
We’re writing our own romantic comedy out here
On the island.
I didn’t think I’d find a place to fit in.
I did.
Dancing,
Last night,
Christin was.
With one of the this-or-that friend who we know because it’s community out here.
It’s small.
But she was dancing with him, spinning and twirling and
I felt like
I remembered a time when
I had not been so subject to everything else that came down
From this minute to
That minute.
I had been able to just breathe in the freedom
Of whatever was going on just then.
Towards the tail end of 2008, over a year ago, I published this:
Being whole seems so simple, but in the end, it will be the practical application of all these things that make us show our teeth. That will make us prove ourselves in trust, and hope, and artistic patience.
I wrote it late at night, evidently. Publishing time after one o’clock in the morning. (In those days where nothing really happened before nine p.m.)
I read it recently, wondering several things. I wondered, in hindsight, if I knew more then that I was letting on. The next few months seemed to hit like an unexpected freight train on an interstate. (what the heck is that doing here?) These words lend me to the belief that I had some foreknowledge of what was coming.
Or maybe not.
The Plan (the BIG plan, capital ‘P’) has been on my mind lately. I often realize, in hindsight again, that God rarely ships us out on a difficult mission without some sort of training. I know, I know. Things happen all the time and they seem to have no reason. But I believe, much to the chagrin of many more well read and educated than I, that there is a Plan out there. It just probably doesn’t belong to you or to me.
It’s all circling me in a sort of feather-like fashion.
They told me something.
I don’t remember what it was.
Why don’t you do this forever?
Why don’t you scream your shadow into the void until He tells you to stop?
Why don’t you make a wave
in an ocean
Consider yourself so small
that you are still just a tree
In a forest
On a hill.
I thought, once, that I did this to satisfy some need in me.
I don’t think that’s true.
I think I do it because it is. And it is of itself.
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