A Moment

Driving home today from a visit with my grandfather I had what I could only consider to be a profound spiritual experience. It was like someone cut a vein open deep within me and I became like an empty vessel and all of life was flowing through and around me, washing me with its brilliance, pain and fury. A  divine humor threading them all together.  My senses took in sounds more audibly and life painted itself into view on a more vivid canvas than ever before.

It's as if my consciousness felt drunk. Not drunk, though, in the way one gets when they wish to forget the world and lose themselves in their chosen poison. No, rather, it's as if I drank to the dregs an elixir that intoxicated my spirit to a degree in which reality filled every fiber of my being. I began to feel a combination of a sort of headiness overpowered by a  surge of energy magnifying and intensifying my awareness of the present. 

It was as if everything I saw was a living poem or story. Volumes and volumes of poems, novels and stories poured out of somewhere deep beneath the depths of my consciousness rising swiftly and momentarily to its surface. It was almost as if I reached a metaphorical hand up and took hold of one of the volumes spilling forth I would be able to turn its pages and read them in full. Creativity churned her mighty waters and pressed through the floodgates of my soul, effortlessly unhinging it and causing  it to swing open. Life presented itself before me and I saw within myself a thousand souls clamoring for attention but past them a bottomless depth of stillness that carried with it the weight but also release of uncertainty. It is there I felt I saw the answer to the riddle of where peace and realization may be found. It is beneath our layers of multiplicity to the core of the present. I swallowed whole these thousands of souls and plunged towards the stillness.

I pulled my car over to a church parking lot I was about to pass. I was nearly home but wanted a few minutes to just sit and be and gather my thoughts. To savor the experience a little longer as it still pulsed through me though more faintly than at its conception.

There were a few scattered cars left but the lot was absent of any other humans. I pressed my head into its rest and breathed deep turning my car momentarily off and  looked up at the church's spire. A line of crosses encircled its base as other ones dotted its exterior on its ascension towards the heavens. One, larger than the rest and the color of gold, adorned its peak- displaying a symbol once so prominent in my past. A symbol that once defined who I was and what I believed. Now, it reflected the sun's radiance and shown brilliantly yet left no impression on my spirit any longer.I found it now more foreign than familiar.

After jotting down some thoughts and taking a few moments to listen to nearby birds that  seemed to be  singing wistfully of warmer days I started the car once again and let it roll away out of the lot. The crosses appearing smaller and smaller as I glanced back at  them in my rear view. My heart was light and my mind eager to try to capture the moments  I just had in prose when I finally made it back home. I hope I was able to do that!


Thoughts? Please consider sharing them in the comments section. Thank you!