A View From the Edge

Every now and then, you reach a fissure or fraction in time.  For a moment, a moment not bound by minutes, or hours, or days, your world stops.  You stand on the edge.  The edge of everything you have come to know.  The edge of the present.  The edge of the past.  The edge of who you are.  A dividing line, a point of transition.  A rim.  A crest.  A brink.  It's like a scenic overlook as imagined by Einstein or Kepler from which you can actually witness two possible worlds.  On one side you see a world of perfect shapes filled with order, and hope, and good; you see the realization of what you want and need.  The other, a different world entirely, a place of misaligned shapes filled with disorder and confusion, the opposite of your envisioned realization.   Separating those worlds are lines, lines of constraint and limit.  Vertical demarcations of choice and belief.  Transfixed, leaning over the edge, you see how narrow the lines are, the margins between both worlds are minute.  The degree of separation is a tiny miniscule space, a space that divides victory and defeat, happiness and despair, fulfillment and emptiness.  The lines tell the real story.  Life is a battle of polar opposites;  winning and losing, success and failure, love and hate.  The best human possibilities lie close to the worst.

  

I sit at the computer and stare through my words.  I remember another time and space.  The remembering is turned into a kind of re-happening.  The grass is deep green and the sky is perfect blue.  I lay in the middle of a field.  I remember the monotony.  It's a strange boredom.  The sun and the heat.  The damp and the moist.  The humidity.  The day is calm and hot and utterly vacant.  Except the thoughts in my head.  They lead down a path which winds through an opaque jungle of memories ending at an overlook.  I stare from the edge.  Endless staring.  Two worlds, a world that is, a world that ought to be.  I see beyond a fence.  Unlimited space.  Freedom.  Never ending.  I look up.  Blue.  Limitless blue; boundless and ceaseless.  It stretches forever.

I take my material where I find it, which is my life, at the intersection of past and present and the future.  Thoughts are like traffic.  Traffic feeds in my mind, it goes in circles, then imagination flows and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different roads.  All I can do is pick the road and go for the ride.  I do.  I see the lines.  Points that separate, margins in life, fine narrow borders that divide.  Real and imaginary marks found in ventures, in pursuits, in risk, in relationships, crossing most aspects of living, splitting worlds.

Perhaps you find yourself in a world where you don't want to be.  You crossed a narrow line.  Shattered dreams, failed relationships, a dark personal situation.  You're paralyzed by fear.  You're on the ledge.  You see where you want to be.  You can't see how you will get there.  You are lost, fragile, broken, empty.  Your mind is captive to the past.  The bad stuff never stops happening.  It lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.  You are pinned downed, landlocked, unable to reach across that line.  You hear a voice from deep within.  It whispers.  It reminds.  It promises.  It has been here before.  You feel a presence.  It is beyond you, outside of you, so much larger than you, your life, your circumstance, your present reality.  Everything goes quiet and you look up and see the sun and the sea of immeasurable blue, and the immense serenity flashes against your eyeballs and in that moment, that precise moment, your whole inner world gets rearranged.  Everything has shifted.  You see the future from the edge.  You get a glimpse.  You feel an approximation of hope.  You sense it.  Now believe it.  Those are His arms you feel.  Trust Him.  That is His voice you hear.  Believe Him.