all shall be well
"But you could see it too, if you weren't so literal", she offered, and I had no rejoinder. Turns out this was not such a bad thing.
Our relationship had been variously pinned and pirouetted through the years by two very different worldviews. Today, through no fault or fission of our own, my intellectual cupboard was bare.
Why *did* that selfless mother of three have to be sidelined then taken out by cancer, when others in our circle carried on with prizewinning displays of selfishness and arrogance in their day to day affairs?
Spiritual tectonic plates move and shift as they will, usually through no doing of our own. I just happened to be straddling two of them at the right time when I was graced by her statement.
"All shall be well" was the specific entreaty that started it all off. I was familiar with the anchorite this had come from, as well as the saying itself, but for once in a long long time, I had nothing to offer. The last thought that footprinted behind the eyes before the plates separated, was "maybe she has a point". Then, glory.
From the left, a thousand muses, balancing impossibilities and entreaties between themselves like foreclosed Jenga towers; from the right an almost continuous in-breath that pulled the blocks out and back, out and back, out and back
until the foreground and background were one
and won
and the victory wasn't a thing but a time, and the time was every Now, and the workshop before me
word and gold filament, and music.
And the task to roll the words in the music and feather the filament on
and take it back to terra firma,
where chaos and confirmation, grief and gossamer, entropy and love were all now backlit by god, a giant paint by numbers waiting for the filamented to complete it
where I knelt gobsmacked and godsmacked, flaying the words from their meaning until only love remained
all shall be well and all shall be well
drifting like a dandelion-spired blanket over the cancered mother and the myopics equally in love
and light
and That
become
This
