Beginnings and Endings

Outside my window, church bells have started pealing. The sun is slowly edging its way upwards into the day. Light casts shadows over the landscape on its way to fully illuminating everything for today. Birds call in the distance. Every dawn feels like the beginning of a new, undefined something. Our days are ours to make of them what we will. How easily the sacred twilight time dissipates and the doors of the day fly open.

It is like trying to hold on to our infant children. That unrepeatable time in their life and yours when there is nothing there but promise and peace and possibility in their little beings. And within those moments, the poignant realization that I can only hold on to them as they now are in memories. Which fade. Aught to do but see them as they are right then, savor them for a little while, and then take yourself away from their cribs and make the morning coffee.

I believe those occasional glimpses of “sacred” moments keep us moving forward. Unrepentant cynics aren’t completely wrong. It is a messed up old world and always has been. But I live for the slivers of sacred moments, then pile them up in my head until I have a banquet of happy moments and memories to look back on. I choose to absorb into myself the peace I know is out there in the world.

It wasn’t always like that for me. Dawn would break, the birds would start singing and I would reach for a glass of the hair of the dog that bit me. Pain begets pain. That is until we decide to step up and into and steep ourselves in its lessons. I once sat in my living room off and on for weeks as waves of pain would wash over me like sitting in a lye bath. Lye is caustic and made from wood ashes. It was used in times gone by for washing clothes and soap making. Overexposure can burn the skin. My memories felt like they were burning mine.

Steeping in the emotional lye bath of unwanted memories, I truly suffered but could feel my heart being cleansed and cauterized. This is the only way to healing, I was assured. To face up to your delinquencies and feel the pain fully before it can be released. Something in there, too, about finally taking personal responsibility for everything you did or that happened to you. That is not to be confused with taking on all the blame for what happened to you. People do bad things. And you have done bad things, too. I did. It is a reminder that you have a choice in how to face up to everything that happens to you – good or bad.

I remember a repetitive thought I had as I was going through this emotional test by fire. In the midst of learning some horrendously painful life lessons, I thought I would much rather have read them in a book. Would that a book or two would have intervened earlier in my life and set me on an easier path. But life unfolds for each of us at the age and stage when we are ready to learn the lessons. That sounds much more orderly than it actually is. We can either learn deliberately by staring down our demons or our demons take over and control us. It’s about feeding the right wolf as I have said before.

We all have measures of light and dark inside us. Refute that fact and you can become one sorry son of a bitch. One of those humans who is so convinced of their holiness and right-thinking that they can make no allowances for the frailty and ambiguity in fellow humans. Evangelical Christians come to mind. They take what is essentially some good common sense direction in the Bible about how to live a good life and go to hell with the joke. As it were.

If you are making others miserable because you can’t treat anyone else’s belief system with respect, then you have kind of missed the point JC was trying to make. I am impatient with stereotyping. I am impatient with the implicit set of “tests” good Christians arbitrarily dream up to admit you to their circle of the blessed and worthy. I am not a great joiner of clubs.

Since early, early morning, the darkened skies are now lightening up and rent through with long skinny clouds of gold. The bells and the birds have mostly gone quiet, their reveille chores having been completed for today. I love the certainty of what I wake up to every morning. I rely on it in my life much as I do my breath and my heartbeat. I stop to take in these precious slices of time in the morning. Because one day, I know I won’t be able to.