Flesh Suits and Souls
This Sunday story is about flesh suits and souls.?
When no one is there but the sound of your breath and memories that rattle and riddle your brain, don’t believe the lies of your lonesome, longing thoughts that tell you who you haven’t been or what you haven’t done.?
Don’t let the sounds of silence dog your soul and steal your confidence like I have too many times. Whipping myself with an invisible ancestral strap sharpened by archaic traditions and handed down from Luther maybe or a strict German farmer along the way. I straddle thought fences, keep busy, and know when to keep my mouth clasped shut. I clean, cook, keep calendars and try to find where God is and isn’t inside casseroles, crockpots, church carpets, and along country roads and career paths.?
I retain the authentic corners of my mind though and travel there with inner eyes. Inside my brain I rest with my real self, while I boil water for buttered elbow noodles, ground some beef, and keep ahead of the laundry. I carve out moments when I create something brilliant maybe. I don’t give up. I can’t. I make meals between the mountaintops and valleys. Ordinary blessings are the “gifts that are simple” threads in the fabric of weaving an extraordinary life. Always dancing with the ordinary to get to that “extra” part.?
I can’t give up because the source of pure, loving energy between atheism and a sort of status quo faith compels me, drives me forward. Yes, the depths and truths of existence exist, wrapping around everything everywhere, a holy ether. The force of nature. The curve of Fibonacci’s code. The places we’re told not to go. The places where we should actually tread. The thread of love, seen and unseen. The law of attraction, chemistry, a connected glance. Desire, satisfied.?
We stumble through saying truths, striving to give words to feelings that sometimes can only be felt. We long for those places that feel like real rest, settling points for our unsettled cells. One of these places of pure rest was found in the midst of Grandma Ruth’s nearly unconditional love. It was also freely given by my mother, albeit only a memory I have from early childhood. It was within their lives once lived that I have been looking years for around the bends of my life. But now I don’t look as much, because I am marching steadily to 50. No bend will lead me to them. No time machine will take me backwards.?
I am halfway now to a forever I feel but cannot see, the search for others who have passed on must redirect itself. I look inward now, so I can fully find myself and see my children confidently take better paths. Paths where they can still come back and find their mother at the turns they need to, (God-willing), further into their own adult lives.?
Yes, forward one must go in this circle, and live in that circle where we keep pressing on through pieces of our lives we tirelessly, (or give up trying), to piece together. ?Until we realize that when no one is there, everyone is still everywhere else, and the sometimes haunting silence is just a break to sink into ourselves. Sink into our flesh suits we all arrived in with bones propping us up, bound together with sinew and spirit.?
This veiny flesh garment I wear that traveled through my mother’s womb, and her mother’s, and even before. Here I am, them in me, a branch of a human tree, with stories held tightly in rings we will never hear from. ?Yet, those stories are very much indeed here inside us, lighting up the eyes and mind, subconsciously directing our way through a multitude of past, present, and future lifetimes.?
And all that rattling inside the mind is the truth shaking on those last prison bars where I go inside to bear a sentence for my mistakes that are coursing through my veins. Coursing through and irritating my frame until I hand over the keys to myself, make a jail break from the locked chambers of my heart, and run for it.?
If I can, I I take moments to really breathe and remember that this awareness of even loneliness, of even guilt, is a gift because I am alive to feel it all, joys and sorrows, even the most profound pain. Even regret. (Eventually maybe, even some grace).?
I know I need to live now, while breath lives in me, because there’s still a chance to journey here, to love here, to discover something new here. A chance to be real here before my rattling mind comes to rest, and thoughts no longer land in guilty places, where flesh and misty soul ultimately become one again.?
One again, inside a future flesh suit another life will wear. They will wear it, and (oh please God I pray), that before then, most of the persistent pain and noise inside my mind and heart, inherited from generations before or seeded by my own hand, comes to eternal rest forever inside …?Me.?