Out of the Cradle, Endlessly...

I lived my life in the shelter of the suburbs. My world was row houses, highways and strip malls and the constant hum of traffic and electric grid. Sometimes I'd look up and it would come back to me: a memory of a feeling, something pulsing through the veins of power lines, the thing that gave those neon signs their radiance. It was always there but mostly forgotten in the day-to-day distraction in which we lived our lives. We forgot to notice how completely we were cradled by the slow, patient embrace of nature.

Maybe nothing is eternal. But set against our quick flight to the flame, the inching up of a new shoot, the gradual change of dark into dawn, the almost unnoticed motion of the stars seemed much nearer to timelessness than anything we could ever know. Whenever I was reminded, I was grateful. It tied me to something much larger and deeper than anything I found around me in the everyday. There was some faint glimmer of memory, of knowledge that I, too, was made of the same stuff, that I knew something of that same slow pace, that timelessness. Somehow, I sensed, I could participate in that patient, creative pulse that, given enough time, could recreate the universe.

Once I could feel its presence, I was drawn to it, often in the early morning before the world woke up or late at night, when it finally fell asleep. I could feel it more than hear it, but I thought of it as a voice that spoke to me directly and called me out by name. It would say, "Everything you think you know, all you see in your world is a projection, a shared illusion made real by belief and the fear of letting go."

Maybe we were all afraid that if we let ourselves wander out into that wilderness, we'd encounter something we were not made to see. Maybe, we thought, it was better not to know, better to keep our eyes and our thoughts focused on the things we made and understood, the things we could control.

And I was afraid. Whenever I walked outside, there always came a moment when I would see myself taken away. And I would feel a little shiver and wonder, "What if I can't go back? Or what if, when I do, I won't be able to tell them where I'd been and I will be left so alone with this?"

But in those early mornings, just before dawn, I would stand still, slowly lower my defense and let it in. And then it began: a pale light, just the faintest sign that the night was ending. I felt the change before I saw it. A bird called, a breeze swept up a leaf. The last of the stars began to fade like a candle floating on the water, slowly submerged. And then, just for a moment, everything was new and anything was possible. Dreams mingled with waking life, and my heart opened and expanded, reaching up into the sky. I felt at peace and connected to all that surrounded me, to the houses, roads and strip malls, to the constant hum of traffic and electric grid, to that something pulsing through the veins of the power lines, to the gradual change of dark into dawn, to the motion of the stars, to that patient, creative pulse that, given enough time, could recreate the universe.