The season is inviting me to allow the space to pull the words that are circling my head and heart at a wild pace. I will need to make this space to stay alive this season, and by alive i mean remotely in my body through the days. I found myself floating through so many moments over the last 10 days that I literally had to tell myself, “your daughter is talking to you, your son is crying in the other room, you are in public at the store….” i sound a little crazy writing that down but I am coming to know the truth of grief again. It seems it can take you so extremely far into yourself or so very far out of body but either way, you do not sense a ground below you.
As I was quieting myself this morning to welcome what may be out there for me this Advent season, i read from Communicating Across Boundaries Blog and stopped on this:
“It strikes me that there’s a profound difference between burying my head in the sand and lifting my eyes up to see above the muck. Both refuse to focus on the crud and horror of what’s happening. But one gives me permission to welcome what God is doing. Looking up allows me to make eye contact with a broader perspective and with Hope itself! If I look up I see above the landscape, I see the horizon, wide and eternal, stretching beyond what I now know, making way for what’s to come.”
and i thought - YEEEESSSSS. I devoutly committed a lot of good energy and years waving my flags of ignorance is bliss, I'm on a need to know basis, why focus on the past….my head in the sand. And in the last decade as i attempted to lift my head, I have felt like i have been facing oncoming traffic going 80 miles an hour then leading to an eternal red light. And as groundless as I felt for the last 340 days of living in a motherless world, staring nowhere, I am now resolute in my eagerness to lift my eyes. Even as I write that I think, no, you don’t get to do that yet, the pain is still so strong it will pull you under like quicksand. Looking up is denial Ashley, stay at the red light. Face nowhere while the grief rides out its endless loops through your body.
And a deep breath later, I think, there is a horizon - wide and eternal - stretching beyond what I know, making way - you can get a glimpse Ashley. The glimpses are part of the healing. The hope that there is light out there - could I dare to believe with all my body is holding that there is goodness in the landscape ahead - goodness for me? Goodness to remind me that a MIGHTY God and LOVING son Jesus exists. And even to imagine a feminine MOTHER spirit that is beckoning me to look up, to receive the comfort of embrace, to be washed over with encouragement so that I may find footing again. Very much like a waddling child, stuck in the sand, up again, seated for a long while with hopes to put one foot in front of the other, to stand without wobbling quite so much.
Words do not seem apt to share the shakiness of my legs to near the mark of a year without my mother. Typing the words dries my throat out and soaks my eyes, it cannot be. Desperation runs through my shoulders as I deeply miss the comfort of her arms, her powerful words, her kind face… and there it is that I hear the faintest voice calling me towards new names for the God I’ve known since a little girl but haven’t called forward ever in this way - a MOTHER God? A comforter on my behalf? She who wants to give me goodness for goodness sake, A God that offers me rest and that looks at my face and smiles in delight? I can hardly believe this invitation, this new horizon that is so softly calling me into this Advent season. And my response is, “Thank you Jesus. Thank you. I had no idea.”