Baby Me

‘Verily I say to you, if ye may not be turned and become as the children, ye may not enter into the reign of the heavens’ Matthew 18:3

I am brought to this thought of a light gray morning. As the photos used to be: light gray. I have been wandering around in my heart, picking up the shards, visible in the receding tides of time, This one is a relationship I had with another, that one a relationship I had with myself. All are fragments blown apart by emotions too powerful to maintain solidity.

Now I have a different take on emotions – now I can keep them at a bit of distance like that old cartoon of holding off the fighter, one hand on her forehead, other hand lifted to cover a yawn. It’s much more comfortable here than it was being that warrior, sweating, bleeding, grunting with effort. I have less of my heart to protect. It is more visible, viable, vibrant, vagrant… That other heart? The one I kept cutting myself on the sharp edges of? Yeh, it’s pieced out on the desert floor by size & color, by name & emotion. I finger these one by one. I remember.

When I was a child, I was still of more than one mind. There was the me responding to the nuns in school, the me wearing the face I only showed to my Mother, the me riding headlong, free, grinning, straight into the ocean breeze, bumping along the boardwalk on my bicycle “Blue Boy.”

That me features most in aspect of who I am today, I’m happy to say!

There was the me in my mirrors, the face framed in braids, the me reflected back from the pages of whatever book I was reading; whatever copybook I was writing in. Perhaps these are not so different from the me reflected in today’s computer screen.

Of course the adults to whom Matthew delivered his message were confounded, looking at one another, judging him crazy for these verbal impossibilities delivered in the name of a Savior already dim in experiential memory (unless you met Him up close & personal.) I’ll bet you the children understood only too well what Matthew meant. Childhood is a “oh me! oh my!” special place where many experiences are new & shiny, bearing no fingerprints save those the child herself puts upon them.

I think she woke up with me this morning. Last night I went to bed, stiff as a piece of wood, my low back sending up a dirge of refusal to bend; I walked up the stairs from one heating pad to another, wondering if I’d be functional in the a.m. But there is this of the miraculous about me: I wake whole every morning. Wherever I travel in the night in my lightbody, my physical body is back on patrol upon waking.

I love the experiences which stay totally new. I love when a layer of my life-built cocoon is stripped away by an experience & I am returned to another me…when I’ve been able to sift through those edged remnants to find one shard fitting into another perfectly. It is a restoration of me I never expect – the eternal surprise of discovery which reduces me to that wide-eyed innocence I once so readily (& so easily) manifested.

From this place, I can grow again & in the manner in which I wish to do so. I need not adopt the comfortable patterns of well-traveled reactions. I can see once again that I am at the beginning of an event. I choose to participate wholly, in a way I’ve never done before, or at least not in my recent history.

Which leads me to ask aloud; “Is history ever recent?”

But here I am, born again of a gray morning, sitting between mountain ranges unacquainted with oceans for uncounted years. Once this desert was the ocean floor. Once I lived beside the sea & begged the ocean to be my mother, Now I peer out the window & beg the mountain to be my father.

Who can love this ragged, paunchy, punchy me? Who would ever be tender with this old bird, treating her like the perpatetic little chick she once was, dashing from seed to seed, colliding with life yellow as a yolk? I may have found someone who regards me so. My sense of wonder is renewed & fulfilled. It matters little if anything will come to fruition from the relationship. It isn’t yet history. In this now, I can be safe as the child protected only by her own senses, living in the most present of moments, dreaming, dreaming. Nothing matters but the dream; the rest will care for itself upon emerging.

Right now is that edge to surf & I can’t pull my attention away,

I am returning to blessing by virtue of being blessed by another; returning to wholeness just as I am. I take one last look at the pieces all about; I understand deeply that this very dream may also join them at some time.

Right now, I am forgiven of being an adult in the childhood of being in love. Right now I can be in my Kingdom of Heaven; surrendered to a King.