Feels Like Relief

When you look back and realize you’re also looking down. This is gained ground. This is higher than before. We’re above the miasma of the past; the gray density surrounding now is just clouds. At least it’s something you can breathe. It won’t kill you. It won’t even threaten you.

The clouds almost feel like they are indeed composed of raindrops or notes of a song, resting all around in the air and on my shoulders, my hair, my face. This is a good place. Cold, but I have learned how to become warm enough in the cold. Damp, but I am mostly water anyway.

It is quieter here, too. The scars are silent; the clamoring memories are a little hazy in the mist, reduced a little, more feeling than fact. The fact is that now safety feels so normal, as if it was always here with you. As if the path to get here could not have been different than it is here, now.

As if kind people were all along the way, and they were. They are easier to see from here, looking back, peering down into the darker twists and turns. Those lights along the way reveal by contrast things better not to gaze on too long.

There’s the steeple, farther and lower in the panorama than expected. A defined place we move in to and out of and by and through and beyond, as our Creator does.

The difference is that anywhere and everywhere Love is, there is no fear.

Already the moment is passing away. There is now more cloud than view to take in, but a few distant lights still wink through.

The rest is obscured. It is hard to remember it. But I don’t try hard at all.

The suspended rain is a cocoon; it only ever finally falls into the footprints I leave behind.

To be here feels like many things, but mostly like regular old life. Because it is. And that…feels like relief.

Photo by Rūta Celma on Unsplash