Out of Darkness

I am lying awake, wide awake in the middle of the all quiet night. Several hours ago, I could not keep my eyes open; now I can’t hold them closed.

This might be for a reason.

Nor is it a coincidence that in my truck tonight after a tarot reading all about holding onto myself, the radio ignites to the best verse of one of my favorite songs:

“…sometimes we ride on our horses, sometimes we walk alone;
Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world…”

More and more, I am listening, trusting, paying attention to intuition. Gifts of information are constantly around us if we are awake to see. So many thoughts or encounters seem random in the push of our daily lives, but related one to the next—like entries in a journal or a blog—they become a string of messages, guiding us like lights at the end of a runway bringing home a plane.

It is easy to be completely unaware and acting on cues sub-consciously, moving ourselves along in a random dance of addictions, or a straight path of rules set by others that never quite allow us to thrive. Missed opportunities can be recounted with a laugh and a shrug. We can plod ever onward, completing our tasks like assignments on a checklist.

One of my daughters would gladly swear, if ever asked, that she has seen a fairy. She will tell the time, place and describe the golden light of the sunset. Her belief is so clear, her comfort level so solid, it is easy to allow the truth of it since nothing but our own arrogant disbelief can say otherwise.

What if it were true?

Last month it was a shock to see my mother and the change that Alzheimer’s had cruelly affected in four short months. She slept at the breakfast table, waiting for lunch, slumped over, head askew, her hair long and unstylish, her soul nearly departed. To all the world, she seems to suffer the loss of mind and function, the vitality of life.

But what if we are wrong?

Enjoying the luxury of a massage 3000 miles away, my sister felt a powerful energy suddenly, and the therapist described a fleeting vision of power and motion, confidence and spirit, an indescribable mass cross and exit the room. Perhaps just a great massage, but my sister felt in that moment the utter safety and love of being in the womb, the gift that had come regularly in our lives to all five of us from our mother.

What if she could escape her tired body? What if she no longer needed it, but could come and go at will, returning now only briefly to be with my father when he comes to visit?

The changes within and without me in the last 18 months have been a series of decisions, some tiny, others huge, leading me away from a conventional and much-valued life of home, family, and tradition, to an experiment in living. The writing resurgence, this blog, began in no small measure to honor the memory of a lifetime of my mother’s urging and support, the proud way she listened and critiqued when I had read her stories so long ago. Such steps have not been clearly designed, or may even be linked together, but are often a response to an intuition, a feeling, a process of leaping without a net.

In Oregon, at the base of a Mountain, there is a place where surfers love to ride. As they catch the wave, there is nothing before them but treacherous rocks and certain death. They must trust that all the water they need to survive and thrive comes with them in the wave. And looking to the side, just at their shoulders, there is often a sea lion riding with them.

In companionship or happenstance, who is to say?

Out of a tarot deck of 78 cards face down, how can the same one be chosen over and over every second or third time?

Sometimes, we don’t have to have the answers; it can be enough just to notice the questions.

Ahhhhhhh, (sighing with relief), Now I can go back to sleep.

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