Prie-Deux

Here, now, just like this. This is that flash of a moment when I feel Your presence, Your friendship.

Just now, sitting here in the dark room, the candle-flame a small, still pillar before me, the coffee-pot murmuring in the kitchen, my skin cool and alive and grateful in the yet-night air, my knees aching from kneeling here at my improvised prie-deux, my submerged brain still kicking towards the lake’s surface. Just now, like this, Your affection and attention are as close and real as a garment.

And I seem to almost be able to touch understanding in these moments. If I were thrown here in some act of divine caprice, I would be a passive victim, and my life would thus have no meaning. But if in some long-ago discussion I chose to take this journey…ah. It makes sense.

Perhaps I didn’t strike out for this place. Perhaps my skiff ran into a storm, and the educational waves battered me up onto this particular atoll, and all of the wanderings and afternoons of hunger and aching eyes while scanning the horizon for help, the scavenging of wood for the building of signal fires that apparently  accomplished nothing, the conversations that seemed to be held only with myself…perhaps there is a mighty vessel that in the fullness of time will appear off in the east and send a boat to fetch me aboard, and perhaps we will set a course for the home port, and maybe there will be a welcome, and a quiet, dark place to sit or kneel and absorb the lessons from this span of time.

Or perhaps it’s all something quite different, something I cannot analogize or shape into metaphor. Perhaps the end-truth will be so surprising it will make me clap my hand to my mouth and laugh like a delighted child at the simple beauty of it all.

Right now, even as a bar of soft gray is brushed across the sky outside my window, the tops of the trees are stirring in the breeze You sent, the breeze that imitates Your Spirit, moving where it will. Right now, I hold onto the sense of Your presence and Your friendship. Right now, it is time to stand up and walk out there into my day. The prie-deux will be here waiting, and I will be grateful for it, because the storms will come again.

~ S.K. Orr