Letters from the Hill (#2)

In the meantime, I turn my attention to what works, which is only what I perceive as helpful. The world does what it does and the circumstances that arise accordingly are like waves I do not trust to hold me yet. Hence, the daily lesson of A Course in Miracles. Hence a walk into moonlit fields with my dog. Hence this, and hence you.

When we tend to what brings both solace and insight, we eventually learn there is only love, a sufficiency sustaining us within the many images and stories that together comprise “our” life. We can’t force this lesson. We can’t talk our way into what goes only wordless. We can only bring whatever order into our lives seems possible and fruitful, and then wait and see.

Forgiving dreams remind you that you live in safety and have not attacked yourself. So do your childish dreams become a sign that you have made a new beginning, not another try to worship idols and keep attack. Forgiving dreams are kind to everyone who figures in the dream (T-29.IX.10:1-3).

A dream is a dream of course, but a kind dream – a forgiving dream – is the last one before the longed-for, hoped-for dawn. It is the one in which the light begins to seep through, in which the lilting song of chickadees begins to faintly resonate, and in which waking becomes a gentle reality approaching as softly as the sun itself approaches, morning after morning, day after day. What did light ever do but whisper?

This is the space in which we stop demanding life accommodate us, and in which we begin to be grateful for whatever appears. We get the job or we don’t. The tea is warm or it’s not. Our gratitude encompasses every possibility equally, and renders them all the same. Joy enfolds us, swaddles us, it carries us here and there, resting us on shoulders that never fail or disappear.

Chrisoula makes soup, we cut the last of the bread a bit thinly to go around, and all of us eat by candlelight. The nineteenth century was yesterday; horses never die. At four a.m. or so the dog and I go back outside, moonlight on ice more lovely than I can manage, and yet I keep looking at it, and walking through it, and it is only moonlight on ice, and it is more than that, too. It is love reflecting back to me the love I am yet being swallowed by. Maybe one more coffee, one more page of the beloved text. Maybe one more letter to you, who never asked of me anything.

The past is gone; the future is not yet. Now am I freed from both (W-pI.214.1:2-3).

You see after a while that it is not you who are reading and writing, but rather you that is being read, you that is being written. Life takes care; nothing needs to be finished; nothing ever begun. How sweet those last filaments of light appear, how soft the last breeze as it carries the veil across the horizon as it becomes us.