It is quiet now as I await my visitor. A terrifying beauty. That is how it will come to me. Will there be wings? Radiance? A face? Light? Glowing? Music? Will it be at all familiar? I wait.
There is nothing.
Must I sit here empty or can I go outward to greet my guest? Are there things I could do to hasten the visit? A chant, perhaps, a meditation? Is it better to have no thoughts of my own, or is there one particular word that will bring it down upon me? I am a stranger to this land. I will do nothing but hold to the stillness. And wait.
I am standing on the ground of my being. I have only the life within me. All else has fallen away. The fragrance around me is like an opiate, and I drift into the comfort of my bedroom back home.
I used to hate sleep because it took away so many precious hours from my schedule. But lately I find it deep and mysterious, freeing me to journey into the dark sky where the moon in full splendor beckons me. Shall I go just one time?
My bed shakes and I am frozen with fear. "Gumba, Gumba!" I call out the cat's name, hoping to feel his paws pounce upon me in playfull recognition. I lift my head and turn toward the direction of the movement. The cat is not there. Nothing is there.
I tense and prepare to bolt from my bed. What if "it" comes after me? Can I outrun its reach, its touch? My eyes search the darkness again for the cat. I call his name: "Come on Gumba, come on." He is not here. I am alone with this presence.
My body is rigid and I cannot move. I exist on two planes. I know everything in this darkness because I put it there: the furnishings, pictures, clock, the heap of crumpled clothes, the dress hanging on the closet door. There are no mysteries in this room by day. But this night, this night has brought me something I do not know and I am terrified.
Why am I so afraid of this particular darkness? It is different; I am different.
Once before, I glimpsed something beyond — something wonderful. I could not stand in the same spot to know it. Tears poured forth and I began running through the house crying and shouting "yes, yes, yes." Then it left, as suddenly and mysteriously as it came. Strangely though, my life did not change because of that moment. I went back to peeling potatoes at the sink. The sink in the house on Walton Street, in the neighborhood of Austin, the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, country of the United States, continent of North America, on the planet earth, in the fiery hot, icy cold, airless, weightless, mysterious, frightening, and never-ending regions of space — the domain of God.
From early childhood it was all the unanswered questions that bothered me. Some of those questions were not supposed to be asked, I guess, out of respect. I couldn't comply. I kept asking and found answers.
Other questions could have no answers, but did that mean they could not be felt or voiced? My life became a deliberate search for answers and it was the persistence of my questions that created a path, a space that attracted the bolt of lightning which answered them all in a flash: the ones you could know and the ones beyond knowing.
From that confoundedly unspeakable domain of God — without voice, without word — came a knowing more than I could fit in this little brain, a feeling more than I could experience in this little heart, an answer so vast I could not stand in one spot to gather it all. I had to run wildly from room to room to make myself big enough, to keep myself in one piece. My desire to know, my determination to search, had created an emptiness, a void, a place for truth.
That truth still a memory within me, I call out to my visitor. "I know you are near, I can feel your touch on my bed. Snatch me from the shape of my darkness, lift me from this realm of shadows that tease and terrify me. I am ready. I stand guard over nothing, have nothing to take with. I am ready. Yes, I am ready."
The scream was horrifying as it tore through the silence and woke me. The voice was my own, still bouncing off of walls somewhere in time and space.
I open my eyes and am again in the waiting place.