Unknowing

They blindfolded me,

spun me around three times and

told me to go straight for the goal.

No time to grow accustomed to the darkness,

to let the vertigo settle,

to acknowledge I knew not the way

Donkey tail pinched between fingers,

my feet made their foray

only to be met with laughter,

the sure sign that

I had missed the mark.

Years later as the planet holds its breath,

humanity assailed by an invisible enemy,

I find my soul reconnecting with this

birthday party bewilderment

But this time, amidst my dizziness

I get to choose –

to stand quite still and let swirling

sands settle to the riverbed,

to release strategizing, projecting, planning,

to ignore the internal taskmasters urging me onward

and plop right down to Befriend Unknowing,

trusting myself into the tender hands of El Roi*,

whose all-seeing eyes were once themselves

banded in shadows as mocking laughter

spewed like lava from the Earth’s underbelly.

But those insults had no power to

draw this God-man off course.

As his followers fled in fear,

his steps were resolute,

going to the cross to hit the

mark that I had missed,

finishing his life’s work with

one crowning act of love.

For three hours the True Light was

shrouded in darkness

so that darkness would be no more.

So when my heart reels,

spun about by today’s sorrows,

he comes –

singing a lullaby to his child

jolted awake by the nightmare.

Note by note, he unties my blindfold

until my soul is flooded with the unseen

Light that no darkness can overcome.

And hand in hand, he shows me (he is) the Way.

*the God who sees

Rennes, France

April 22, 2020 (begun April 8, early on in the dizzying swirl of a global pandemic...just some pieces of my heart that have found their way into words. May you, too, hear the lullaby of Light.)