Tuesday, September 27, 2016

The Crooked Things Straight

Getting lost within yourself is an unsettling feeling. What matters is counting on faith that things will happen, and people will get through. That there will be spirit enough to conquer the bad within and without, to cut through chaotic sound and fury, and lead in good ways.  What’s maybe most disheartening is when those around you give up on you.  Then it’s about really counting on the one who created you, trying to know, to grasp at not being alone in the struggle.  Words for me have always been my sanity point—writing itself as a way to make sense of the chaos and reach toward God.

When I write, I find a way to draw out of me the many mixed emotions and ideas I have, all tangled together.  It’s extreme mess, this tangle, and all that I love and is important to me is in this mess, so I must, feel compelled, to disentangle. To look at the mess and see it for what it is.  It’s unsettling to see this mess, and feel helpless as to what to do with it.  I feel sometimes as though this chaos is unmitigated, unruly, and other times I find the most unusual help along the way that I suddenly feel as though somehow the getting lost is a part of the fray.  And fray is the right word here—this constant rubbing, wearing away, the way feeling lost and dealing with daily internal struggle. It’s messy.

The other day I felt Tom’s presence—there was no other explanation: I’d been talking out loud to him, imploring his help in the middle of an argument, and all of a sudden there was clarity on my part as well as that of my other half.  He was so close to us in life that I believe he could, in an act of love from beyond, reach us this way.  I have a whole other view of faith, having had this experience a few times now. It hasn’t been a singular thing, or coincidental.  It has been a thoughtful set of moments, and crucial moments, during which I have learned something important about myself or those around me.  I think there must be something to this, even though I grasp at its effluence, its ethereal presence. There’s something there, then there’s nothing.  And then, most notably, there is in fact a solid change left behind, a grace, some kind of reconciling that makes the soul feel as though something right has happened, that the crooked thing has been set straighter, perhaps, or at least set upright, accepted, warmly, into a new space.

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