Crawling to Soaring

Dear reader, isn’t it crazy when you believe you understand something and discover to your dismay that you only comprehended the smallest particle of the thing, the bare minimum? This is what I am discovering about my knowingness of love.

I am a babe in the woods, barely crawling as I scratch and scrape my way, belly down, eyes periodically looking up. There are creepy crawlers, scurrying and moving incessantly around me, climbing overtop of me; they bite and will eat my flesh, telling others that there is a feast, if I stay too long in one place. I look to my left and then to my right as I frog like, inch my way through the dense forest. My eyes land on others, they are down on the ground with me. I recognize them and it dawns on me that they are with me because I have pulled them there with my thoughts, with my words. They had no choice in joining me, I am that powerful, that mighty. My hand feels a prick and I yelp as I lift it to my eyes. In the shadows I must squint to see that a thorn is embedded there. I pluck it out, cursing my hand placement, cursing the pain and looking to my left, to my right to see if anyone has heard me? I see they are looking my way, wondering the same because they too, are being stabbed and gouged, wounded as they crawl close to the ground, the scent of dead and rotting things entering their nostrils, filling their minds with misery. I break the gaze after seeing the pain there, knowing that we crawl parallel to one another but that we are far apart, the distance seems vast, a chasm that cannot be bridged. I stay low, they stay low but I am finding the position to be cumbersome, awkward, unnatural and I speak, asking no one and any one, why am I crawling? I have stood before, walked and even run at top speeds…why am I down on my belly? As I rise, I gaze again to my left and to my right and I see that my companions have left the ground and they are rising too. In wonder, they look down at themselves; a gentle breeze brushes twigs and dirt and earthy remnants from their clothes and they look upward to the sky, the suns rays streaming through the leafy canopy above…I look to see what they see and my breath is taken away. Light bathes each of us, flooding our souls and now the earth seems so far away, a distant memory as I fly, soaring on the wings of an eagle and my companions, they too have taken to flight, never to crawl again…