How Many Quiet Days Do We Get Before Everything Explodes?

Life has taught me many things. Among them is that it never stays quiet for very long, at least for my family. In worrying about Patty, however, we have the seeds of a palpable fear and a distraction that might keep us from fully realizing that something truly good is going on. Instead of peaceful days bringing life back into dying souls, they are fraught with worries over when and what the next tragedy, the next heartache, will happen or will be. This makes relaxing a little difficult but it definitely keeps you on your toes, even though what you feel you need and want is to be in a slightly more recumbant posture. I often envy people who seem to have quieter, less painful lives. However, it is wonderful to be able to see individuals and families who do not have eight million tragedies or trials going on at any one time, to hear a child laugh because there is nothing hindering their childish happiness or to watch a proud parent glow with the love and joy of seeing a healthy and successful child take first steps into a larger and more promising world. But then, there is the let down of having to return to my own reality and remember that such joys have been, at times, nonexistant in our lives and may be again all too soon. I hope and pray that our times of trial and pain will soon yield to joy and relief as unbidden ills heal and as the burdens of worry slowly dissolve because there are no new trials to nourish them back to life. Even though my sister is not consistently present, I feel her life persistently present in my heart. I am with her even when I'm not. Every fiber of my being is filled with the hope for her full recovery from the leukemia and also the dread of her not recovering. It is like a tightrope drawn across the very deepest, most primal part of the soul; savage and wild, infinitly strong yet curiously weak and fragile. It is hard to say how the balancing act is accomplished, deep in these normally forbidden recesses of individuality; the center stage is shrouded and the safety nets may or may not be in place and secured. The walker may be temporarily or permanently blind or experience vertigo while hovering over a Niagra Falls of grief and distress. There is no knowing if the current actor will make it to the other side of this abyss because the other side is cloaked in mystery and steeped in a morass of ignorance and care.

Enough of this introspection, this philosophizing about the uncertainty of life and untried premonitions! Today there was no bad news so perhaps tomorrow will refuse to yield to the negative energies of fear and dread. Whatever troubles might happen may yet prove too distant from the day for any sort of speculation and the sun may shine again and again before anymore trials render our hearts and minds numb again. It should become my mission in life to fight such misery, and surely I will win, with memories of happy moments and joyful times of jubilation: the births of a nephew and a niece, the recovery of a parent thought too ill to mend, the return of a beloved pet thought gone forever, the beauty of a perfect day of soft air and glowing sunshine, the whisper of a high breeze through the tops of lushly green trees throwing their arms about in the sky with the abandon of natural freedom and beauty, the murmurs and chatterings of birds tending young ones and nests as the dusk settles in and the night gently folds itself over the earth. These are the things of life; these are the things that give life, forming the backbone of the defense for human continuity in the courts of Heaven itself.
Am I too human, and therefore too frail, to carry or to be sustained by what nature provides for my survival when there has been so much trouble seeing any survival?
That depends on whether I can take nature's gifts along with nature's requirements; whether I can soar into the Heavens, touch the face of God, and return to earth unscathed by the reality I have found at the foundations of life itself.
Many religions provide some explanation or instruction about an afterlife, but it is always shrouded in that particular religion's requirements for membership and salvation - according to their rules. What if each religion has only grasped a small part of the reality; the truth? Nature, as it stands, is the creation of an omnipotence beyond the understanding and perceptions of human minds and hearts although we try very hard to fit it into our limits and rules. God is not able to yield to our molds. Perhaps we should set the Almighty free and stop insisting he adhere to our understanding, our thoughts, our limits and limitations. Just as God does not need any of us for PR purposes, so he does not require our permission to act as and be God. God is true to his own nature and cannot yield in any way to ours. We need to let go of God, stop telling him and one another what and who he is and how he will behave, what he expects, and start giving to God the one thing we desperately need to give to each other, the freedom to merely, gloriously be. We must, finally, be as kind to God as we would have him be to each of us and we need to let go of our demands on other people who do not share our beliefs and choices. God gave each of us a free will, how can we rightly assume he does not, therefore, have one of his own?
How can I, thinking all of these things, not understand the terrible beauty, the unending threat and ever present promise that is nature and that is found in the very heart of God and the hearts of every member, every being, of his creation?

Seeing God - a poem

We try to fly but find
We are tethered to the earth.
We have yet to learn
We can truly soar.
We must release our hate,
We must destroy our fears,
We must give up the rules
We have cherished for so many years.
We can only truly soar if
We release the demands
We require of a God
We can never fully understand.
We need to see ourselves as restricted from our births.
We need to give God freedom to act upon this earth.
We will learn, someday, to fly.
We will soar throughout the space
We create in our own minds, then
We will be able to see God's face.
We will someday touch his heart,
We will someday see
We could never get it right alone, because
We have always been too "wee."