Historical setting: 584 C.E. The house of Eve, pagan healer
A long night of sleep into this waking with graying skies, and now it is late morning. Yesterday I was listening to Nic talking on and on to let me know I’ve returned to a world of ever-changing human life. Thank you God, for allowing me to be alive while splayed onto this bedsheet in the stillness of listening. Thank you God for such a friend as Nic who is telling me of this world I was returned into alive again.
Today, I am able to move, thank you God. I can move my mortal human form as was intended in creation, stretching now a hand and a foot and one-by-one each part of me once nearly bare bone, now a new painful stretch of sinews forming.
I’m thinking of Ezekiel seeing the valley of all the dry bones. Was it an ancient war? Was it just a time forgotten? Why was it so distinctly a valley? Or was it a plain that felt like a valley? Was it his valley alone with a whole earth of dry bones? Human spirit wanders the valley we see and touch and long to find the Spirit of universe in the pain of stretching in a way of growing anew.
The prophet doesn’t mention the length of time it takes for the sinews to return to the bones, for the breath of life to be shared among those rising up, for the stretches and the pangs of new life to howl then sing, then rise and dance. Why did the hand with the inks copying these pages of Ezekiel’s valley for us to read in this new day fail to keep the part about the pains of each growing into new strength — the rising first on elbows only up from the clay and then to sitting on the edge with new strength barely noticed, but rising above the dust cloud. Was there no word left in the story telling us it was a very long time to wait before the dancing? Rising is so slow and painful even in the meager measure of human years. Healing seems to make itself a story with too slow a plotline, an eternal continuation, an ox journey that needs editing …
Eve is in the doorway with a sorrowful continence.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 