Look deeply into the eyes of the being in this picture. I was going to joke and say, “This is how I feel after Covid, am I right?” but the wisdom I see here shames my giggle and hushes my nervousness in the presence of something uncomfortable. Here is a face that knows the arcane, things that could disturb your rest. She is a female condor, one who not only eats death, but can actually fertilize her own eggs, snatch a creative spark right out of the maw of the mystery and hold it in her body until it becomes new life. Gazing into those eyes, I see freedom.
It’s been a while since I shared with all of you and I’ve missed the connection. While I was able to move much of what I do to a virtual platform, I wasn’t able to teach or do group work in person. I recently began seeing people in real life at my office on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the bliss of human contact almost makes me weep with relief.
But things are not back to normal. As many of you have figured out, normal is broken. In fact, normal was actually pretty sick and soul killing to begin with, we’d just gotten used to it. Jokes aside, after countless months locked in a house in the company of my own demons, there is something I recognize in the eyes of that condor. We’ve seen things. We know things. None of it is going back in the bottle anytime soon.
Like the condor, there is strange life gestating within us of mysterious origin, and there’s no way to know what’s in those eggs without prematurely cracking them open. But my sense is these are the seeds of the world that will be born from our brokenness, the shattering of our certainty. While we wait for their time to come, I plan to enjoy the stillness for a little while longer.