Aunt Virginia’s echo

Reverberated deep within the well. Silence ended and just as words reflected, light appeared.

Not one motion came racing; each marked its entry cautiously fearing that courage would dash before its arrival.

Sometimes when a world topples off its axis there’s no way of knowing if what’s lost can ever be regained.

It’s that ‘closing of one door’ that leads us to wonder,  “Is there a new door I should be opening?”…

A fork in this road, the leading distance felt, but not, as yet, traversed. What about this untraveled landscape?”

I have come to believe that it is less about choice and more about unexpected discoveries, an absolute by which the current has been ever-present, but the ability to perceive its justice, lacking.

We all face an unexpected detour(s) from time to time. It’s within that nature of ‘believing’ that we consider we are the sole proprietor of our destiny. (My ignorance, not yours.) This is what I thought I had understood to be true for me.

And then, sometimes, suddenly the road that was once before us is never more. And in later review we come to realize that what we thought was there, in the first place, was a mere folly of a thought to begin with.

Let’s call it growth. I’m a slow learner, a dedicated, died in the wool believer that good deeds always win over the negative bugaboo’s in life.   Allow me to consider that I can cast them far from my existence;  If I try hard enough I can convince myself that I can get past that fortress. Give me time. Solitude, and this persistence. Just give me.  Me.

So, back to that well, the one that bellowed forth that echo, awakening me from my complacency. Had I tried to understand that I was deserving of only my sense of existence and its place within my world? What a shameful and arrogant assumption. I am greedy, ignorant and shameful within my conceit.

I awoke one morning to find I’d aged into antiquity. Knowledge rained down in sheets upon my doorstep. What had once seemed so valuable was now so inconsequential. Items more precious than gold, or even more exquisite in value, had been cast into life’s composting heap. Realization of what I valued most sat before me, divulged within its bare nakedness, there for my taking if I could accept that they were important simply because they were now part of what had been, my life. The one where the foot journey had me believing that I’d made all the decisions, and all of them were correct, as well as, absolute.

And so it is, this echo, the one I discovered while attempting to retreat from the pain and sorrow of my emptiness. It had called to me and directed me to a place I’d forgotten.  I ventured to the center of the universe, to arrive at home. The one where others exist, in spite of trivial pursuits and self indulgences.

I ripped off the vacancy sign. Tore
open the shutters. And I allowed my self a view to, and through, the mirror.

I arrived to a sea of loss, multiplied by a number greater than one, or two. Three, and still greater than four. I stepped away at the count of seven. And, when all my counting was done, I found myself overly fascinated by the number two. To which I admit was my greatest loss. But she was also my greatest gain.

Some people enter into our lives by what we think are random chances, others we don’t give much thought to how they arrived, they simply occupy a space beside us, thus traveling along for a bit of our journey.

This well of mine has me convinced that none of these meetings were happenstance. All hold a value far greater than any I could have possibly known, or imagined. One of greatness, and of grace. Individually, as well as collectively.

It was that special number two that turned the light on for me. The one that gathered the other six and said, “let’s go give a shout-out. I know she’s listening.”

That posse game looking for me, wrangled me and set me upright. I toddled a wee bit, now and then, lost in my sadness for those that no longer occupy my physical space within their time.  And then I remember those truths that I hold steadfast to, that cannot be shaken from any foundation.  Those that comfort.   They are born from the knowledge that a life well lived, is one that is also, deeply loved.

Things in life will come and go, but loving someone deeply, truly, and sincerely, we get to keep that for life.  No questions asked.  No postage due.