A Moment of Clarity

While she was backing her car out of the driveway onto the road, Winnie wondered where she would end up if she drove south on the road instead of north. She had never continued past the Woolever's home. And because of the leaves blowing from trees like torn brown parchment pages and thin ribbons of steel-gray diaphanous clouds stretching out of the horizon in trails of lost grandeur, Winnie drove south, following the winding road between irregular stretches of oak, birch, and pine.

The blacktop changed to gravel and the road narrowed, not well traveled. There were no houses. Neither were there signs of telephone or electric service.

The road narrowed again. She climbed a steep hill, turned left, then right, and descended into a valley marsh.

Cattails, skunk cabbage, wood asters, and thick-bladed grasses rose out of standing water on both sides of the road. There were few trees taller than hedge height, with the unsightly, bowl-shaped nests of herons lodged thickly in them. Three deer stood knee deep in a shallow pool, eating floating vegetation and staring at her car in wide-eyed disbelief, water streaming from their narrow, delicate mouths.

Still she could see no houses, driveways, or mailboxes. She drove over a narrow bridge with wooden planks, rusted iron sides, and a hand-painted sign in orange letters, EIGHT TON LIMIT. The wooden planks thumped loudly against her tires. On the other side Winnie parked next to a stand of sumac and returned with a doughnut to stand on the bridge above the little stream.

Not wanting to get her clothes dirty, she refrained from sitting on the planks and leaned against the iron railing. The clear, cold water ran beneath her brown shoes and she ate the pastry with great satisfaction after discovering the filling to be custard. Overhead, a skein of geese flew in a disorderly V-shaped line, calling in hoarse, plaintive tones. Once again she was reminded of her dream from the night before. Checking her desire to eat the remaining portion of her pastry, she tossed it into the water as an offering of thanks and watched in float downstream and around a switchback. Crisp autumn wind moved through her thin shirt, touching her skin. A sugary buoyancy filled her stomach. She contemplated both sensations on her way back to the car.

As she climbed behind the wheel she was startled to feel her name spoken. "Winifred." She climbed out and turned back to the bridge, hoping to find someone behind her. She was alone. But she was certain of having heard her name spoken in a clear voice with throaty personality. It had felt to her like the voice of her mother, yet not hers, a voice she knew yet couldn't place. Most of all, it had resembled her own voice speaking without the unusual interior echo- from the outside. She walked back to the bridge, stood in the middle of the planks, and listened.

Once again she heard her name spoken, this time in its more familiar appellation: "Winnie." Accompanying the sound came the sense of someone beside her, behind her, before her, around her, someone she couldn't see and couldn't touch, someone whose presence was intensified through the absence of anything to attribute it to.

The feeling of buoyancy she had earlier experienced in her stomach delightfully changed and spread through the rest of her body. She felt light enough to float. It seemed as if the breeze moving across the marsh could carry her with it. She held this feeling for a moment and then realized something very uncommon was happening. The grasses in the ditch appeared to be glowing. The red, cone-shaped sumac tops burned like incandescent lamps in a bluish light unlike any she had ever seen yet instinctively recognized. And the pleasure of recognition- discovering the familiar within the unknown- comforted her with its stillness. She looked at her hands and they seemed to be lit from the inside, her fingers almost transparent. The light glowing within the grasses and the sumac glowed within her, within everything. They sang with her through the light, jubilantly, compassionately, timelessly connecting her to past, present, and future. Boundaries did not exist. Where she left off and something else began could not be established. Everything breathed.

She understood her predicament: the world, experience, sensations, memory, time, and dream could not be separated. The realizations taking place were not taking place "inside her," but all around, everywhere. The problem lay not in establishing the objective truth of what she perceived but rather in establishing how the truth had come to be perceived- how otherness had been obliterated. She participated in being looked at as much as looking. She was not simply having a vision of something; she was something in a larger vision. A Great Omnipresent Looking had turned upon her and she looked through it. The whole world participated in awareness.

The miracle of consciousness, the hiding place of God, split open like a fruit too large for its peel. Time lost its linear appeal and assumed the form of the wholly holy. Events, forces, and mind were the same thing, creatively at work. The world and the Kingdom of God became factually identical; each existed one in the other. The sun reflected from the clouds in avenues of colored ideas. The contradiction of conceptual antagonists stood side by side, making sense. The solitary miracle of Pure Grace held everything else inside it, wonder and peace. Death stood before her and she recognized it- a mere shadow cast by life, not a separation; the breathing of life bound it up as shape binds substance.

She walked down the embankment and into the stream, where the cold rushing water swirled around her ankles, calves, knees, and thighs in such a happy, embracing manner that tears filled her eyes. The water was alive. And as her sense of herself as an autonomous individual migrated into everything around her, her sense of isolation and loneliness merged into belonging. She found her true home and her true home found her. There was no "other" place. The grasses were part of trees, part of the smallest organisms in the water, part of the water, part of the worms in the soil, part of the soil, part of the air, part of her. All were constantly changing into and out of each other. And all of these were part of God, that infinitely small and infinitely large spirit that loved her, whatever she was, whenever she was, without reservation, and the realization of this love brought the luminous splendor of divine, mobilized thoughts flooding through the world. It felt like waking from a nightmare of harsh and brutal illusions into welcome beyond measure. A banquet of celebration had risen up inside her and around her- more and more life, larger, richer, and more joyful life.

A white pickup came clanking down the narrow road, thumped and rattled across the little bridge, and came to a stop not far from Winnie's little car. A man in a work coat climbed out and stood for several minutes looking between Winnie's opened car door and Winnie in the creek. He climbed down the embankment and walked along the edge of the stream.

"Is everything alright?" he asked.

"Oh yes," said Winnie, the water rushing around her.

"Are you sure?"

"I've never been surer of anything in my life."

"You're crying."

"If I am, it is different than you think."

"I was afraid you might be having some trouble. My name is July Montgomery and I farm in Champion Valley. That cold water will ruin your health."

If only you knew how little those things matter."

"You're probably right," he said, and sat down on the bank beside a honeysuckle. "Come out of the water- just for now."

But Winnie didn't move. She didn't know what to say. This was the most important time of her whole life, but its importance was unspeakable. Words hadn't yet been invented to talk about it. What now filled her was understood through a long chain of lucidity that would break if she spoke about any single link. Nothing, yet everything, had changed.

The stranger sitting on the bank was no exception- he also glowed from the inside. She could feel both his kindness and his sorrow radiating from his face- feel it as her own. But she couldn't explain.