Sunset

Dear Reader,

It is nearly Fall, and with the shorter days and cooler nights comes, like clockwork, a deep, restless yearning for a spiritual life. I know it's coming, because my dreams change. This week brought some of the most intense dreams I've had, ever. One night I dreamt I climbed Jacob's Ladder, and Heaven was a thundercloud that billowed up into the universe. The next night I was in a hospital, where I learned that I had imagined everyone I loved in my life. One by one they left me, taking their warmth and love with them, like seeing your life before your eyes only in reverse, and everyone who entered is now leaving. Even Jessie's loving face, the only constant in the dream, faded into the amorphous face of a nurse I didn't know, and I awoke in terror and grasped for Jessie's warm flesh. "She is real," I yelled silently. "She is real. They. Are. All. Real."

It has been this way for eight years, ever since I turned 18 and bought my first book on Witchcraft out of a deep, primordial, beyond-words desire for a living spirituality. Every year the power takes on a new expression: a deck of tarot cards, scholarly books about Jesus, the Tao Te Ching, astrology, telekinesis, you name it. Without fail, it possesses me, as though this particular change of seasons shifts something within me that needs to exist deeper than I currently am.

I've had an idea for this blog for some time now where I read and comment on a passage from the Tao Te Ching for each post. It's a text that I found particularly inspiring. It's also a ridiculously fun candidate for some clever wordplay and high-minded, low-brow discussions about just how applicable woodsman Lao's text really is. I think we should go for it. It should be fun. And it won't be every post. It won't be this post.

Today at 4 PM, my grandfather called an ambulance for himself. By the time they arrived, he wasn't able to tell them what medicines he was taking. He wasn't able to make words, no matter how hard he tried. The words weren't coming. He managed to call my aunt before the ambulance arrived. She was at work, and didn't take the call, but she had a powerful feeling that something was wrong, so she left work unannounced and went over to the house to find him sitting in a chair, unable to speak anything but gibberish. Twenty minutes later he was at a hospital in Wooster, OH, who told my aunt they didn't have the necessary expertise at their little hospital to give him the emergency care he required, so he was transferred to a hospital in Akron, OH. We're still awaiting the results of the tests.

Mom called me as Jess and I were driving home. The call came as all calls like this come, like lightning from a clear sky, and I regaled her with questions about his condition, whether he would improve. As my mind raced and the tears flowed, I was caught by one of the greatest sunsets I had ever seen in Pennsylvania. The sun, a fiery, rebellious orange, burned brightly in a lavender sky. Clouds tried to pass in front of it, but it singed their edges with blinding light. As it lowered it lit the horizon, and halfway hidden and partially obscured, it torched the sky with a deep palette of brilliant reds and blues and purples. The sunset had burned so brilliant that night never truly came, not the whole way home. I could still see the deep blue, still warm from the raging sunset, as if night could not overtake the memory of the sun that burned so bright. I felt a tiny tinge of peace.

Please pray for my grandpa. We don't know what happens next.

Martin