The Cold Gray Dark Of Dawn

In the cold gray light of the pre-dawn hour, I awoke from a dream.  Griffin was a toddler in body but a man in spirit.  I was holding him by his arms and he was moving his legs to convince the doctor that he could walk if only he could will his unwilling limbs.  He was pleading that his will was strong enough and with the doctor’s trust in his will it would be so.

I waited in bed, half asleep, recalling a dream as it unfolded.  I tried to will myself back to that place where I held my child by his hands as he walked as a man while still a boy.  Back to a place that was real, but never existed.  A place where I was giving him that which he never received.  But it was gone.  So my eyes finally opened and I was back to my reality.  I wept quietly, somewhat embarrassed.  That cold gray light, where colors are absorbed into nothing, and everything, is where I awoke.  And where I live.

There are moments like a dream, where the world unfolds in all its shades and shapes and I am fully alive.  And so is he.  I grasp at those moments like Jacob grasped at God in the tent, trying to wrestle that glimpse of paradise into submission so it won’t ever go away.  But it does, as it always will until the day we are truly named.  

And there is no blessing from God like Jacob received, simply the blessing of knowing that wrestling with God is the journey and the path to receiving our true name.  And also the blessing of knowing that what we see as light and color and fulness today, the now and the present is only the cold gray light of the pre-dawn hour before heaven and earth become one.  There our dreams open our eyes and we see what is and was always real.  That our fulness comes not from our conquests and our triumphs, but rather from our wounds.  Wounds that are, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, the cracks that let's the light in.;