Redemption

 For the last year, I have rigorously avoided any form of augury or divination, for reasons too lengthy and personal to  detail, but I've  had this ability all my life and it seems, just deciding not to use it isn't entirely working. On impulse today (THAT kind of impulse, that comes not from you, but through you) I opened a book I was just putting away, one of a number in a large stack, and thought "whatever I open to is what  need to hear, germane to this moment in time".   And, this is what I opened to.....it absolutely blew me away with the relevance to this moment in time for us all, as well as my own journey through darkness this last terrible year.

Such a  gift. May it stir your soul's hopes as well.



Redemption

The fever breaks. The world returns.

How could we have forgotten this sun, this yellow day? Did we not see the birch, the pine? How could colours, and hope, have fled so from our memory? It was not good to live inside a scream.

We step cautiously toward the light. Our legs are unsteady. Outside, the wind still howls in the bones of the trees. The snow still swirls and rises, cobra-backed, into the frozen day.

But the sun again has life. After three weeks beneath a lifeless sky, we again dare to have a dream greater than survival.

We throw open the windows in the dark rooms of our souls. Light is streaming in.  Our spirits turn and rub their eyes. We are moving back toward the surface of our lives. Promise arches over all. We grasp, greedily, at time, and clutch it to us. All tomorrows’ mornings stretch before us, languid.

We are no longer islands. We gather, laugh, talk warmly of the time that has passed.
Who outside us knows of days where the cold stole away all the colours, where life was so frozen that every step had an echo?

Let others put names to our darkness, try to shape it into words and pathologies. They have not stared for weeks into a sun that gave no warmth, with the eye of a corpse, turning our every thought toward death? They have not watched ghost lights drop heatless and molten in a midnight sky, have not heard wolves cry out over frozen waters.

No, this is not illness. We may wish to have been born in the shadow of a mountain, where each day lifted our eyes in something close to awe. Or on the edge of an ocean, where infinity had a softness, and declared itself anew each sunrise. But we were born on the edge of winter, where our lives are marked by absences and fears, and a too intimate knowledge of the ways of death.

But, for now, it has passed. We have been plunged into frozen waters, held until we could not breathe, then lifted up, redeemed. The world assaults us with its beauty. No baptism could be sweeter, no salvation purer.
We raise our hearts in quiet joy and lay down our helpless sticks of fire.

Kent Nerburn

Native Echoes: Listening to the Spirit of the Land

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