My eyes aren’t fledgling anymore…
A sort of somberness settles inside me with the implication alone. Growth. It makes me nervous. It can get so big in the britches. But this is a deeper knowledge of self – one that appreciates to a greater degree how little a person ever truly knows about themselves.
That’s how I know within myself that something has changed.
‘Discernment’
I seek and find the word buried within the discipleship classes I took in my 20s… Back when he and I were still new. It feels like the right word, but I’m unsure. If confidence is key, I’ve lost mine again.
What I am sure of is that mine are eyes that look farther down the way, inspecting, with what feels like a heightened awareness. They search because of all they’ve seen.
The great grey heron arrives with a grand, gaping in-and-out landing just there in the creek. Words on wings, I think to myself. They bring confirmation to a thought that hadn’t wholly formed.
Weren’t my eyes always searching before, yet never finding?
The thought settles over me like a fog. Yet, something lifts.
My muscles relax. The tension in my neck releases. My ears pop and expand, as if I’ve climbed a mountain.
I’m sitting on the porch swing, allowing it to carry me, bobbing toe to heel.
My grandmother is rocking me.
I catch my own head as it falls.
She allows the motion to slow. The porch swing stops, and we sit together. The wind chimes float on a breeze I don’t feel, cooing to me, soothing me… They allow it to come – the waves that had been brewing underneath the surface. The ones inside me.
The crows cackle, and I wonder why at first. Snot had begun to drip from my nose in a long string. I laugh, too. I’m such a child after all… I blow like a good little girl and wipe my face. Tidy myself, I think, but the words aren’t mine. They come to me. Mine tell me to get back to writing. Eager to be your best pupil…
But now, my ears are plugged from all that blowing and blowing. Deafened again from overzealousness. Blew my brains right out. I hear it through my dad’s jesting voice, but I still try to pout.
I’d blow ‘em right out, and no one would bat an eye.
You might not even notice ’till it was too late. I’d do it right under your thumb, and you’d smile.
An ethereal note plays on my wind chimes. It reminds me how we all speak into existence the fates that we choose. I feel my father’s warm, suntanned face. Its grinning down into his hands.
Yeah, yeah… My eyes roll with teenage angst, but I’m keen to it. Now anyway…
So I bend my neck to one side. The cracking it needed comes easily. Then, I bend it back and feel another part of me jar with a flurry of creaks, and I settle. My mind pulls the phrase from its catalogue of memories – We’ll straighten her out.
This kind of thing takes time – something much more of which I lay awake at night, fearing we might not have. It stirs restlessness into my body that wants to harden and calcify.
I won’t let it.
Pain pushes me to keep moving, so I do.
Patience
I have to remind myself…
Now, it takes longer to focus, and sometimes, the connections don’t come all at once. Other times, they do… That’s when the color drains from my face. You’re watching a battle only you don’t know it, or you pretend not to.
You’ll ask me, though. You’ll see the clouds and probe the waters. Foolishly, I’ll answered you – off-the-cuff, the way I always said I was most misunderstood.
This is where I’m still weak.
God might have given me all the answers, but I’ve been a little self-indulgent, taking my sweet time in putting them back together again. Like Humpty-Dumpty, but I keep dropping whole chunks of the puzzle onto the floor and having to rework them.
Yet, I am patient.
And so are you.
We keep coming back. That’s how I think I know. That gives me hope for more days… more time… with you…
Hope…
Because there is still a stirring of full-moon fever in my heart. It has me feeling my own wings for the first time. I don’t need to take flight alone, but I can…
The Princess Bride in my head speaks, “… as you wish?” Then, I stand, awaiting your reply to the question you haven’t heard – What do you wish?
The song birds and sparrows sing your response. Our departed most-beloved chirp-chirp inspiration from the brush and all around.
I don’t understand this time. Yet I stand … on one foot, balancing in all my crooked-crane ways, and I listen.