If patience is a lost treasure, and timing is the alchemical force guiding the universe, what does waiting feel like?
What are we to do while we are being patient? Sometimes waiting feels heavy with melancholy and despair. It is by its nature uncertain and frustrating, the outcome being unknown. If only we had some certainty or reassurance to cling onto. But all too often there is nothing, driving us deeper into the abyss.
What that abyss looks like varies from one person to another. For me, I see endless fields stretched out in front of me, filled with perhaps lavender or heather, or something equally sweet, safe and insipid. Stretching for miles and miles as though I will never get to the end of them. At last, I sink down into the grass and flowers, inhaling their herby scent, feeling the brush of the stalks and leaves gently scratching my skin. I drop my face into the thick undergrowth and start to sob.
Nothing feels right. No path that I could take through this field would lead me anywhere different. There is just this ordinary, empty moment, and nothing happening all around me. It feels so bereft of any purpose and meaning, so sad somehow. Birds all around me call out their songs, telling me that all is well, but all I feel is this heaviness in my heart.
Perhaps, if I keep walking, I come eventually to a cliff’s edge, looking out over a dark and angry sea. The black water below churns noisily, throwing itself repeatedly on the rocks which protrude from the cliff face, gnarled and perilous. At the far end of the horizon, the milky sun retracts its warmth from the sky, leaving a forbidding grey expanse in its wake. It is dusk now, and nature is telling me to go home or stay and partake of its nighttime ritual magic. I sink down onto the ground, my feet giving way beneath the weight of my body which has grown heavy with walking and waiting. I have no energy in me to go home.
I will stay here, my eyes fixed into the distance, and await my fate. It cannot be worse than the nothingness and empty ordinariness which lies on the return side of this journey.
The coldness in the night air wraps its arms around me, playfully nipping at my ears and cheeks. The night birds have taken over the song of the day time and fill the sky with melancholy clanging, as sombre as a church bell. I close my eyes, and darkness fills my head. Whilst usually I pray for solitude and quiet, now I long for company and reassuring talk, a hand on my shoulder, a loved one standing next to me.
The landscape around me is as silent as the voice in my soul, as devoid of answers.
I stay here a while longer. Tears making their presence known, but not quite ready to fall. Companions for another time. Right now, my task is to stay here in the silence, to demonstrate my willingness to welcome uncertainty, to make melancholy my friend, to let it teach me its lessons while I ponder my fate. “Good things come to those who wait.” I heard this somewhere. How would we ever know if it was true? How would we ever know when waiting was over?
The cold settles on me like a mantle, my pale skin a snow drift on the empty mountain top. I must leave now or I’ll never get back. I won’t find my way through the deepening dusk and gloaming. I welcome the cold and dark a bit more. Closing my eyes against their harshness, wondering why night time brings with it such fear and despair, how something so beautiful can be so unforgiving and hard. And knowing, as I make my way through its ever-darkening kingdom, that it is the only thing that can heal me.
I need to go home now. I need to put this behind me and ready myself for the comfort and light of the morning sun. The possibility, the way it will sing its song to me, calling me back, telling me to be patient and promising to bring me something new.
I will be back here tomorrow.
This is what waiting is like for me. Beautiful, strange – impossible to understand. Something you cannot rush or avoid. Calling you to a place that you cannot see yet. Embracing you, filling you with sadness and hope simultaneously. Leading you on persistently, even when you think your feet cannot go another step.
Renewing you every day.
dancingappaloosa 