Learning To Dance With Death
“He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”
I’ve been learning to dance with the lady in the long black dress. Her deep brown eyes pierce me with endless knowing. She hides nothing, yet can’t fully be seen. Unfolding bit by bit, an infinitely mirrored mystery.
But when She looks at me, I’m raw and exposed.
There’s nothing I’ve
thought,
been,
done,
that She doesn’t know.
And it breaks me.
Down.
I’m down on my knees, again. Tears running rampant in my parched Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Death.
That is Her name.
And Grief.
Regret and Shame. No, not Her. They lurk around. Waiting to catch me as I’m falling down, to tell me everything without external sound.
The choice is always there, between the two. Death that leads to death or the one that leads to truth.
And, Truth sets us free. The Bible tells me so…
Freedom feels like a prison in this panoramic desert glow.
Strange thoughts overtake me, like the pleasure of pressing my raw ache into the needles of a cactus so I can feel the pain I won’t.
Dehydration
Depravation
Desolation
They’re enough to make you mad.
But if you don’t let them, you’re worse off than if you had.
This madness is the kind that strips you naked in your narrowed view.
Throwing everything wide open into its originary hue.
No longer distorted.
Plain in sight.
Your actions all reveal you,
There’s nowhere left to hide.
My initial descent into the desert came with a swift fatal blow.
One I admittedly presuppositioned.
Summoned to initiate this desiccated inquisition.
Before She came to see me, I was lost in my little story. One of being “hurt” and “cheated,” “a fool,” “unwanted.” How pathetic and boring - absurdly absudity.
A greater fool was I, and I was about to be found out.
She came as I was mouthing my self pitiful lyrics. If you listened carefully enough, you’d hear even the broken-stringed instrument. They went something like this:
Dusting off
I’d hit the ground
Fell from Heaven
All the way down
To earth’s shriveled groundI sit on dry desert
Beside my fallen crownKissed by razored lips
Maimed by life’s brutal blow
Alone
Forgotten
Unknowably unknownI stand up to try to see
Only wasteland surrounding me
No water, no tree“It can’t be true,” I mutter through.
The love I believed for and chose in you.
The heat stirs up a foreign rage.
But I’m free now,
No longer caged.
What do I do with freedom here?
Aren’t I:
NO ONE
NOTHING
in NOWHERE
What hope is there in a place like this?
For a fool like me.
This isn’t a fairy tale ending.
There’s no white dress or white horse.
No happy ending, no bliss.
A snake slithers across the sand.
I cry out to this nothingness, everythingness: God’s Creation,
and it echos back:
Show me thy ways
Take my hand
If you show me how,
I’ll rise again.
She appears now, across the sand,
Her long black dress hides Her form, but not Her hands.
She is a woman, unforlorn.
I feel her vibrations through the ground
She is unmistakable now.
Beyond human incarnation,
She's
Eternal Timeless
Infinite Vastness
Midnight’s Abyss
Her name rolls off my tongue,
I AM ISIS.
No sooner did I say Her name,
Than the flood of memories one by one came. And, I felt ashamed.
But not in shame, really, for,
I AM in GRIEF.
And She’s in me -
A brokenhearted undoing of the poor little me.
I saw everything I couldn’t see,
When my eyes were focused so narrowly.
This wide-eyed illumination,
Retold the entire story’s narration.
Beautifully quenched in a liquid-love oasis,
A visceral contemplation, removed me from my brittle stasis.
Flashes upon flashes in memories.
All the things, I didn’t see.
And each by each,
I lowered my face.
Humility, the underside of Grace.
Sweet like honey
Rich like milk
Mingled with tears
Went down like silk.
Destroying my appetite,
For anything
For all.
When your eyes open like this,
you feel quite small.
You realize how insignificant all the significances were. You see you lost sight of what mattered, like pressing your face into a wall, you can’t see the ALL, at all.
But zoomed out, in this sudden way,
All that was - is on display,
You gnash your teeth and wail away.
This is the part they didn’t say:
No one will save you from the Truth that sets you free.
From Its sheering revelation,
From the dust beneath your knees.
The Truth sets you free, the Bible says.
Sometimes it’s not with pleasure, but rather by Her whip.
Whiplash against a stiffened neck.
Out of nowhere, unbeknownst to you.
But what if this is the upside of Truth?
A doubled-edged sword,
Revealing the motive, the joint, the binding cord.
Fractures into which the gold is poured.
I open,
I yield,
I take it in.
Grace upon Grace,
For sin upon sin.
My humble ask:
Lord,
Let me live as Love yet again.
Amen.
She is pleased
I am, too.
And suddenly, I’m here writing this in my 10x10 room.
“When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption…”
