Remembering Heaven and the Endless -- Part 1

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Part 1 – Heaven and the Endless
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The sky was blue black above me. November wind swirled around me in a cyclone of sere leaves; corpses animated by the deitic breath of the earth.

Breathe.

That’s what I tried to do as the cold bit into my fingertips. The night sky was filled with stars, glittering in the eternal eons of the universe, winking at me from distances that in my mortality my soul could not even begin to grasp. My universal insignificance nowhere near the microcosm of the infinite I wished it to be. The vertigo of the heavens was heavy upon me, and I suffocated beneath their weight.

Before me, surrounded by trees was a doorway. Curtained from within, light spilled out around the edges of the heavy drapes. The hung completely still, yet in their immobility seemed to dance within the light, embrace it, cloak it in a protection I could not understand from where I was outside it.

The Light was where I wanted to be, yet I stood immobile, afraid of it. I was afraid of what lingered behind that curtain.

Not afraid.

I yearned for it desperately with a yearning I did not understand, and that yearning . . . that misunderstanding of myself kept me rooted there, ankle deep in the dying leaves, my own hair whipping about me by the cold November wind that threatened to crystallize me with its frigidity.

Frigid. That’s what I was.

I did not move, and yet I was standing at the door, my fingers pressed against the transparent glass door that stood between me and the heavy curtains, my eyes still shielded from the Light within. I knew that my feet had carried me here, but I did not remember the journey, the release of the roots of my insecurities. Somewhere lingering as a shadow in the back of my mind I remembered the trudge across the soft, spongy earth, damp and swollen with a forgotten rain. I remember the sensation of the squish of the mud as it gripped my sneakers. Though it did not hold me back, the caress of the mud added a solemnity to my walk. Or so I remembered, somewhere in that shadow of my memory. But as I stood, fingers pressed against that glass, the cold seeping through my fingertips and burying itself in the frail bones of my hands, I remembered the walk, know that it was some part of myself that propelled me forward out of my frigidity and towards the abstract warmth that the Light promised me.

The movement was not pre-meditated. I cannot share the thoughts as they spun through my brain in the instant before I slide the glass aside and felt the wave of heat burst through the curtains and envelope me. This place stands outside of time. I see that now, though I did not know it then, perhaps because time did not exist there. Or I should say it does exist there, but all times existed there in unison, a orchestral whirlwind of time signatures, silent and cacophonous, harmonious and mute. There were no thoughts. There was only movement. A conviction that refused frigidity. A preserving curiosity, refusing to let me fade to evanescence and rise like vapor into the blue black night.
To cease to be.

That is what warred within me. A desire to simply cease and a raging need to exist. To enter this place was to embrace destruction and eat of resurrection. There are moments that change your life. This was not one of those. This was a place that to enter would eradicate any conception of the self before as the Self and replace it with a memory of what was. Its timelessness would permeate your past and place it within the stars like a constellation, a mythic memory of something that sings of the ghosts of truth.

Or maybe, it was just a door.

But glass no longer froze my fingertips. Now Light sterilized the Chill that had eaten away at me as I stood in the leaves beneath the night sky. Now the curtain fell away at my touch, Guardians, deadly and full of flame that would allow no retreat. The Flaming Sword of Paradise made of twilled cotton.

I closed the glass behind me and stood in Eden.