LIFE WITH THE FIREFLIES

When You Say Nothing At All

"It's amazing

How you can speak

Right to my heart

Without saying a word,

You can light up the dark

Try as I may

I could never explain

What I hear when

You don't say a thing."

Sometimes I want to play hide and seek just so I can hear someone say "I found you." 

I want to play hide and seek, right now, this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow.  I want to be found.  I want to be heard.  Somebody please hear me.

What is it about being heard?  What is it about having someone listen and actually hear?  Often times we try so hard to be heard that we ourselves are sick of hearing the same scenario over and over again? Why would we possibly think anyone else would care and listen endlessly to our rantings and ravings?

Such has been the past few weeks.  There are unbroken spaces and places in time when it just can't get any better, and then there are those times when these spaces turn into a shambles. It is in these times when I want simply to lay in the grass, as I did when I was a child, and count the stars, wondering what my place would be in the universe.  Many evenings I would run joyously after fireflies in the dark and wonder if they still glowed in the daylight.  I would later come to love reading Jane Erye and imagine myself the heroine. I wondered what I would grow up to become.  I wondered what it would be like to be a wife, a mother, a grandmother while my heart was waiting for direction to these almost sacred questions.

Never did I dream about or anticipate those places where life impales us.  Places where there is an eruption of chaos, confusion, and a chronic sense of exhaustion. Intrusive events that Sue Monk Kidd says are, "A death, an illness, an accident, a lost job, a broken relationship, an unwelcome move, a dashed dream, an empty nest, a betrayal."  This is all a part of life with the fireflies.

It is during these times of transition when we try to find meaning and value, while coming to terms with what is!  It is during these times that we want someone to say, "I hear you. I have found you."

I whisper prayers in the daytime and during my dreams.  Over and over again last night dreaming I was stuck in a highrise building, with smoke was billowing all around me, I kept saying, "God save us. God save us." I was crying out this plea when suddenly a window opened and the smoke vanished as quickly as it had come. I had wanted to be heard.  I wanted my prayer to be heard.  I wanted someone to say, "I found you. It will be alright." 

In each crisis we endure and live through, there is a buried epiphany that elevates us, shoves us, pushes us, propels us into an awakening.  A place where we finally see where we have been led, sometimes dragged kicking and screaming. A place where we are supposed to be.  A moving on, a moving away from, a moving toward something new.  We have been in a place where we were supposed to be for a while.  Not forever...just for a while.  Then it is time to move on.  On to the next part of the journey, the fluid experience of this thing called life.