We have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our Homesickness. (Herman Hesse)
If I didn’t dare to speak to you, or follow the blackbird’s song, or stay in the overwhelming silence, God never would have appeared. (Mark Nepo)
It was during the darkest periods in my life that I learned the most. And what I mostly learned was that the whole plan of life is pretty simple. You show up. You check out the scene, and you listen very carefully. You respond and do the things that seem to be presented to you to do. And you follow the meaning, the Path that just seems to unfold in front of you . . . you don’t have to worry or obsess about it (easier said than done), or try to make anything happen, or control events . . .
I learned that there is a Grace in life that can be trusted to carry us. In the words of Rumi: Birds make great sky circles of their freedom. How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.
I don’t think that anyone really has a happy childhood. At its best, it’s a time of magic, and wildness, and terror, most of which we keep to ourselves, because we learn early on, or at least I did, that there’s really no one around that we can tell it all to anyway, even if we knew how to “tell” it. It’s not a tame time, it’s a time of high drama, fraught with fears of vampires and ants and orange trucks and elves, and maybe even clowns, and for sure, monsters in the closet . . . And it’s a time of wild abandon, and joy as sharp as that first lick of an ice cream cone, and the heart pounding excitement of trying to go to sleep on Christmas Eve, and the cloud in the sky that looks exactly like Prince Charming. Or a dragon.
And for some, it’s a struggle for survival.
It takes years of work to forget that wildness. I gave it a good try. I studied. I performed. I did good. I forgot. Whoo-hoo, I was grown up.
And then life happened, as it does for us all. We all gotta take that journey. Light and dark, labyrinths, night journeys, twistings and turnings. Disappointments, triumphs, broken dreams, betrayal and loss. Ordinary life co-exists with brokenness and despair and loneliness, and gradually you surrender that magical belief that someone is going to save you, protect you, or show you the way . . . if you had ever been lucky enough to believe it anyway.
But then, if you listen very carefully, you hear the rustle of angel wings, and gradually you realize that those “angels” have arrived to summon you to the adventure for which you have longed always. That long-forgotten “wildness” from childhood is returning.
But the angels don’t often arrive in quite the way we imagine. They arrive in the middle of an enormous storm, one that we fear may blow us so far outa Kansas, like Dorothy, that we’ll never get back.
Remember the old saying about turning to God for help when our foundations are shaking, only to learn that it is God who is shaking them? How very true that seems to me. How can we not love a Being that cares that much about us, that would create a storm of such magnitude in our lives that we would have to pay attention . . . bringing us what we need rather than what we think we want.
Maybe we resist because the “little me” believes I’ll have to surrender everything I’ve come to believe about myself, the story I’ve told myself all these years . . . it might not be a great story, but at least it’s comfortable and familiar! Who knows what might happen if we choose to believe something else?? The proverbial wolf arrives, “huffing and puffing, and blows our house down,” and what you have spent years carefully building can be destroyed overnight.
That “wolf” has come in many guises for me, and the deconstruction of those stories that I told myself about being who I thought I ought to be rather than who I am is an ongoing process that I suspect will last over a lifetime. Thank God.
The eternal cry of childhood, familiar to any parent, and still heard in the depths of our own hearts, is “I wanna go home.” Home is the place where we belong, where we can truly be ourselves, without pretense. Perhaps we can, at last, “come home” to ourselves, and know who and where we are.
Listen. Can you hear the rustling of angel wings? They’re arriving to “summon you to that adventure for which you have longed.” They’re calling you home.