Returning to A Space to Exist

After the fact, I wasn’t even sure what had happened, but I woke up with a sense that the unremembered night had been important. It was the first real snow of the year and if I were being cynical, I might think it was the cold which woke me before my alarm (despite my perpetual state of sleep deprivation). I wasn’t being cynical, though, so I thought first of my Father’s connection to the winter storm--and that’s the true miracle of the thing: that my mind leapt to the unseen explanation.

 As my absence may have betrayed, I have been at odds with myself. It isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled with my potential for atheism, and because atheism is my birth religion (or birth lack-of-religion?) I doubt it will be my last. But with a light dusting of snow and a dream I can barely recall, I am suddenly back in the world that seemed so easy to walk away from when I went to bed last night.

There was a journey over a mountain and that may seem trite, but it was a mountain less like the kind one typically thinks of and more like the kind I know—a mountain worn down and rounded by time, thick with blue misted woods and fireflies. It was the kind of mountain crisscrossed by well-traveled paths and foot roads leading from one point of pilgrimage to the next. It was the kind of mountain where you might well miss the peak and not notice you’ve crossed it until the ground starts to angle steeply enough to make you watch your step on the way back down. There were ruins along the way, but they were almost as modern as they were ancient. I was asked to do something for a god and that led to much back and forth and doing of things that are hazy now.

I put my small golden ankh on before I left for work because I couldn’t quite put it down after I’d picked it up. It is the first time in months that I’ve worn it. The little blue tear gem jangling next to it—the one for my mother—feels empty, but I leave it there anyway because it has occurred to me that maybe empty isn’t as much of a problem as I thought it was. I was hurt when her spirit suddenly evaporated out of my life and moved on, but I’ve come to realize that much of my relationship with her—our closeness, the peace between us, the connection I was desperate to make real— was ultimately just an illusion, one I willingly fell for, and holding onto the tattered strands of that spell won’t help either of us. A part of me wonders if she didn’t really haunt me out of love but rather out of remorse for what could have been.

That wasn’t the only thing keeping me in silence and doubt, of course—there was a well that needed filling, a fear that needed calming, and a pride that needed overcoming. The shrine room is dusty and cluttered and the ancestor altar in need of tending but the little light that minds them and needs them has been kindled by a winter dream. And so I am back to try again at this.

But I am also back where I started in some ways. On the outside. In the margins. Carving out a space to exist.