blessed
There is a place I know, where sometimes the dark night's sweet dreaming leaves me. I've been there often enough, though I haven't figured exactly how I come to be there. I think the ways are legion. It is a dry and rocky plane, featureless and unforgiving, uneven underfoot and jagged.
I do not like it there. But as mysterious as the way there is, so too the way out. After all these years I still can't map it. All I know to do is wait, to remember that I have been and gone before, to believe that this is passing. I hunker down, I conjure the scent of water. I wait.
I have been here for days now. Every night I give myself to sleep in the hopes that my dreams will ride me out to a sweeter place. And every morning wake to the stark and barren landscape.
This morning I thought maybe I should strike out across the desert in search of something, but I didn't like the idea. It came to me then that maybe if I turned around and looked behind me I would find some alternative, some other way. And sure enough, behind me rose a cliff face, cool and dark. This was where my spring was, I knew it. A little hollow at the base of this cliff, a little grotto where the sweet water bubbled up from deep deep in the stone heart of the world. I pressed myself against the rock face, seeking entrance.
And I succeeded - seeped into the rock, into the dark and the damp. And popped right back out again. Again I tried, again succeeded and again popped right back out. I couldn't manage to stay in the dark and the cool and the moist. A third time I tried, got through and found water. I dipped in my hands, cupped and lifted the water to my face, slipped my body completely in and let the water hold me. Knew joy.
Then I was out on the sand again in the shadowless light. And I began to despair. "Please, oh please," I cried, "take me in."
And then a voice came down to me, lovely and stern and tender. She said to me, "There's work to be done."
I picked myself up. "Yes. But there's so much work. So many things to be done. What work do you mean especially?"
And she turned my attention out over the desert plane. "Get out there."
Horrified, to be turned out like this, I protested, "Please, I want to stay by the water. Please."
And then, ever so gently, she said to me, "You are the water."
And she was right.
I found that whatever I laid my hand to was moistened by my touch. The dust washed from the leaf. The stone revealing those colors that only come with wet. And I understood that my work was to walk out into the desert and bring wet to the dry. It was suddenly perfectly clear.
But no less daunting.
"Lonely work," I said to her.
And she answered, "Yes." That one word falling on me in blessing. "Yes."
And so it begins.
