dust

I stood on a little mound of dirt under the tree, shivering and clutching my camera; intense; studious. The sun was setting, and it was glorious ... glorious ... glorious ... I knew there was glory, and I could see it, smell it, taste it ... soaring in, strewn careless and exquisite all across the horizon - as if sunsets were a dime a dozen, so here, have one on me. But who would have dreamed up such colors, and splashed them just like that all over the sky? Who would have thought to splay the clouds out like feathers, and to bathe them in a glow that took your breath away? Whose idea was that? It was an awfully good one, I'll tell you. And I wanted to go swimming in it, to open up all my pores and drink it in, I was so thirsty - I wanted to melt away in it and learn it and become it. But I knocked up against the glass. There was a window there, and I could only look through at the glory. I wanted through, I swayed back and forth a little with the depth of breathing, the longing ... but the sun sank, and the clouds faded, and that was it. Muddy twilight, and I turned around and walked slowly back to the house.

I stood in the salty white sand and I sank, while the waves played around my ankles and took the sand out from under my feet. I stared out across the water, and I knew it was vast ... I knew it. I pictured a globe, and I pictured a map of the world, and I pictured all the blue, all the blue. I imagined how far it must go, how deep, how angry. The waves rolled in from China, and I wondered what they brought with them, and where they found it. You could touch the waves, you could grab them, and it was like you were never there. You could dig up the earth and blow holes in it and stack it up with skyscrapers and draw spiderwebs of highways all over the map - but you couldn't touch the blue. It just was, and it just had been, since the beginning. Who decided it would be a good idea to put so much water on our little planet, and who filled it all full of salt? I could feel the years rolling in through the waters, ever and ever, untouchable; I heard joy in its liberated roar; and I wanted to dive in, wanted to roll away with the sea foam, wanted to dissolve like all that salt. But it was an ocean, and I was a girl, and I stood on the sand, and the waves surged on.

I laid on my back in the damp, dark grass, flat on my back on the crust of the earth, spinning through the universe, and just laying there. I looked out at the universe, while the earth clung to me and kept me from flying out into it, and I shuddered when the damp crept in through my sweatshirt. There were fireballs out there in the sky, roaring, towering, convulsing with brilliance and power, too bright to even think of looking at, too hot to survive, too huge to understand. I should have been terrified. But when they looked at me from the universe, they looked from so far away that all I saw in return were little glitter-flecks strewn across the blackness, little pinpricks in a thick velvet curtain, bright and cold and shaking with life. You know those times when you stand before something amazing, or realize something astonishing, and all your insides fall away and there's nothing left but wonder? I missed it that night. I looked out at that universe, and my heart beat against my ribs, and I knew there was glory ... but my beating heart didn't understand. It looked up at a painted ceiling and it didn't understand.

And now you're going to laugh at me, because the analogy that comes next is so very foolish - it really is. But that's fitting, isn't it? Look at the western horizon in the evening, look out across that unbounded sea, look up and try to imagine the vastness of space ... and look to its Creator ... and then look at me, my plaid pajama pants, my stained sweatshirt, my sleepy eyes. I'm pinching my lip right now while I think, and I have a sore throat. It is fitting that my analogy should be foolish, is it not? His strength is made perfect in weakness.

Because I think that, in all of those instances, when I looked out at the glory, and reached for it, longed for it, sucked in my breath - I stood on the edge of a spiritual sneeze. It was coming, I felt it build; I waited, and my heart pounded ... but nothing. A pause, no breath. Nothing. And that was it; and I had to turn my back and keep walking.

I don't know - I like sneezing. It reminds me of standing on mountains and by oceans and under sunsets, and almost catching that glory. It reminds me that when my heart pounds after something I can never quite latch onto in this life, it's only because my quarry is in the next. It reminds me that in just a few short days my sneeze will come through, and I'll fly away into His glory, and I will be caught up in it ... and of all wonders ... this creature of dust will become like Him. 


Who would write a story like this? Hallelujah.