The First Step

 

Are you searching for your soul? Then come out of your own prison. ~Rumi

She dreams so loudly, like an exploding star in the vast distances of our universe. In the vacuum there is no sound, only the bright light of a brilliant soul radiating from her eyes, but in the ether she loudly displays the fantasies of a well-traveled mind. There is a certain air to her illusion, a certain power to the way she sleeps, yet a definite familiarity to the story and her devotion to it.

I wonder, am I so familiar a being to her?  Do I live in the quest to find my own sense of comfort? Do I have a way about me that grasps so rigidly to the ideas I was raised to know? Do I define people so easily as to not truly know them? Have I defined her this way?

I listen to her story, one she’s likely told silently and aloud a million times before. I don’t know the script, so I improvise responses rooted completely in my truth and laid neatly in the fog of her beautiful mind. I feel myself getting lost not in the story, but in the one telling it. Her eyes embrace me tightly and I’m lost in the swoon of her tales. I enjoy the back and forth of equal minds sharing their tales of joy and woe, and the suddenness of the warmth growing within me shines brightly in the gaps between my thoughts. Tell me more, please. I need to hear you sing.

She smiles, letting me share the humor within her as it tickles places within me. I try to reach inside her through the crevices she allows me to see until I reach the walls she has yet to tear down. I can feel the years of work done there and, for a brief instance, I lose myself in the sadness of this place as I discover the years, the tears, and the wounds that give life to this hardened part of who she is. I’m brought back to the moment, mostly due to the power in her eyes and partly because I want to honor the warrior who sits in front of me, shrouded and blanketed yet fully exposed in both the reality and fantasy of the her own unique human experience.

Here I find I would rather be nowhere else. Here I am in amazement, bewildered by my own sense of truth mixing with hers, sensing something real in the illusions we share. I can either surrender to this journey or run from it. My legs decide they can’t move, my mind decides it is safe, and my heart decides that it is exactly where it wants to be. The white flag is raised in the most wonderful way possible.

There are no certainties in the folly of man and mind, yet first steps are as close as we truly get to the future we so devoutly question and so eagerly entertain. Those steps can often resemble an infant crawling, a toddler’s clumsy footfalls towards there, or the strongest of warriors walking headlong and confidently into battle. Yet they’re all the same. They are all motions toward a fate we choose, and we arrive in the best way we can with no certainty of destiny’s sweet embrace.

Yet we go because we must, in either direction in whatever manner we choose. Some remain stoic as granite statues sculpted by the winds of suffering that have weathered the softness away. Others move in various ways toward the sands and surf of a life ripe with beginnings. In this dream, in this illusion of promise and bewilderment, I sit and stare into the eyes of an angel, wondering what lies within the footprints not yet cast.  I smile, and I know.

Peace.