Last night the harvest moon hung so full and low I thought I’d grown taller. Thought I could reach out and touch the brilliant ball taking up most of the autumn night sky. Heaven felt close. Felt like a pinky-promise moment.
After a season of looking down, watching a frail, heaving chest, it felt unfamiliar to crane my neck back and exhale. I’ve mostly been tucking my chin and holding my breath. Looking down into the depth of minor details. The sort of details most of us don’t notice until we are slowed to fine-print pace. Much of life is spent glossing over and signing the bottom line. Get to the point. Better yet, get to the good part. But the fine(r) things are right there. The facets and nuances and lessons, all there between the dash on our headstone.
I believe anew that waiting on a promise is much like waiting on a baby. Very much like anticipating birth. Promise is oftentimes brought forth with blood and water, like other living things. The foreword is the stretching and enlarging of capacity. The bulging of our being. The tearing of our flesh that what is eternal might come forth. The hope that what is unseen will safely arrive as seen. When what we’ve known on the inside becomes real on the outside. Can’t help but see the parallels in death, but perfectly reversed. Watching and waiting for the promise and reality of heaven to come for us. To be birthed into the truer reality hovering just above our awareness. Awaiting the relief that heaven is. I think that’s the reward—the relief of being Home and held by the One who created us.
I find we are most vulnerable before birthing a promise. Most in touch with our limitedness and helplessness. Infantile. Most aware of our do-or-die predicament. And that transition can be a primitive one. Pure soul adrenaline. Thinly veiled, that blessed hope can bleed through. Lightly draped, that we can set our eyes upon the prize. Lock our gaze with what’s been told to us; what we believe is on the other side of that pain. Pain proceeds the promise. I know that I know that I know this much.
In the light of a harvest moon, the peak of earth’s yield, hangs the ripe complexity of shifting seasons. How each one presents (not so) metaphorical death before ushering in new life. How hope beams brightest, heaven feels closest, as another season and promise has been fulfilled. I took a deep breath and reaped the bounty of the beauty that is life and death, both.
SHE GILDS THE LILY: a lavish waste of words and wonder 