Secret garden
We have no control over things. And of this I can be certain. This morning I woke up at 4:30 and since I couldn’t go back to sleep and since it was a cool 70 degrees — I went outside. I had a fresh cup of joe and my earphones plugged into my phone. On YouTube, I listened to songs that wooed me in my youth. I stood at the top of our driveway and looked out over the tops of pines as cotton candy streaks appeared.
Sometime about halfway through Springsteen’s “Secret Garden,” tears fell. ”You’ve gone a million miles
How far’d you get
To that place where You can’t remember And you can’t forget …”
A bubble had risen up. It had been in a cave. And a small voice asked the question “why?”
It was a girl’s voice. Asking “why” about something that had dismantled her world. Something the woman still struggles with. And the girl and the woman met, both looking up at the sky. And the girl felt safe enough with the woman to ask her “why?”
And this time, the woman was able to comfort her.
I leaned on air, suspended and heavy. Time stood still. I didn’t have an answer. But the girl didn’t need one. She only needed to be able to speak, to ask. To be acknowledged. It was enough for her to be released to ask. Beneath that 5 a.m. sky. Because in the asking, the place that held the pain was loosened, and somehow that early-morning, mid-July air got in. And swept right through me.
Just in time for both of us, it turns out.
So things, more often than we realize or maybe even acknowledge, happen as they should. Measured, marked, shaken down to minutes, seconds. It’s in how, where, and when they land.
That moment of release met me on a morning I couldn’t sleep.
We are deeply layered beings, compiled by time, history, and experiences as unique as our fingerprints. If we’re being honest — we don’t know ourselves nearly as well as we might imagine. How could we? So many threads and lines.
We are each a maze of endings and beginnings. Barred doors and cracked gates. Secret gardens and seaside strolls. We are as dependent on each other for self-discovery as we are on ourselves.
And just as that moment came for me, perhaps even stirred me from my sleep so that I would meet it, we should be in the business of coming after one another.
Stir one another from slumber. Away from the pandemic isolation we’ve become accustomed to. There are tools available for us, but they come through connecting with others. Come back now.
Let me behold you, friend, so that I might also learn of my own heart.