Magic
For all the intensity of that last post, and the shards and threads bit at the end, I’ve traveled quite a ways from the center of that darkness. I’ve traveled to a land of much happiness, actually. If you’ve read here for any length of time, you know this. And this is precisely what I want to talk about today: the strangeness of healing.
What I find strange is the way that inner healing doesn’t happen all at once, all in one big chunk like the healing of physical wounds often appears to do. Last summer I cut my finger badly, and all year long I’ve watched that cut heal, first scabbing over, then releasing the scab, then becoming a dark red line that slowly faded to the color of the rest of the my skin. It’s appeared as a seemless progression.
Inner healing, though, seems different. Maybe there’s ways that it’s not, but at least as I’ve observed it, it feels like it comes in spurts. Or, maybe more accurately, like all the stages of the healing process stay inside of us, even when externally we’re living the scab stage, or just the fading scar stage, or the not even remembering we got hurt in the first place stage. The stage of open wound, or initial shock, or the early days of throbbing, mind-numbing pain–those stages mercifully don’t stay on the surface forever, but I think they live somewhere inside of us for good. And I really mean that–for good. Unless we could erase our memories permanently, I don’t see how they couldn’t.
So that’s what I’ve been trying to make peace with this year, or maybe the last few: that no matter how happy I feel, how healed and whole and glad for where I am and where it looks like I’m going, there will be times, even seasons, when those other stages of healing or woundedness will surface. It’s just part of how things go. Eventually I might not be surprised by this, and maybe after that, not annoyed. But regardless of how I feel about it, I think that’s how things go.
Some people think of the healing process like a spiraling staircase, where you simultaneously make progress upward or outward from the center of your pain while returning to the various stages of healing repeatedly, as the circle brings you round and round. And I think this metaphor works. I’m wondering, though, whether even that’s more linear than how we experience the process, and whether something else could help more with finding meaning in the midst of the yuck that resurfaces, in the midst of the WTF?! feeling you get when something you thought you were done with shows up again.
So here’s what I wonder: What if healing is like a magicians hat? What if deep in the darkest places of ourselves, at the very bottom of our hearts, all the pain of our wounds and our losses resides, the pain and the various stages of healing, the memories. And what if those things are not monsters, are not snakes or bears or lions trying to tear us apart or things we must cage or silence or muzzle, but doves. What if they’re doves that are ready, sometimes, to be released, ready to come to us as symbols of peace, maybe actual evidence of our movement toward that peace, and the process of putting our hands in our hats and finding them is not evidence of being stuck at all, not evidence of being permanently broken or weirdly addicted to pain, but rather evidence that more peace than we’ve known so far is on its way. And that the pain that is surfacing is not there to stay, but rather wants to fly away, out from our darkness toward light.
This, to me, is the realest, most wonderful kind of magic. This is the stuff that makes my heart sing, and my fists relax in a month when the bottom of my hat has been teeming with eager, bustling life.