Awe

One time,
when my eyes were very large, and filled with tears I could not explain,
I saw you.

You showed yourself to me, for a half a second, for eternity. My heart could not bear up the wonder of your story, nor my mind cache your glory. There are fractured images, cartoonish now in memory, and that feeling, that caused me to weep with awe.

Bare arms with a golden arm ring, light flashing off your mail. You are victorious, naught could stand in the end against your purity. There was love, and sacrifice; a thousand times rewarded. There is hope, carried through a thousand dark nights until at last it blossomed in light and joy. Your hair is tossing in the wind, crimson now like the blood you had shed for love. There is a wind blowing off the mountains, and where it touched there is no fear.

But most of all, I was comforted. I had been sick with despair that you were small and fake, imprisoned in a few deluded imaginations or confined to a screen or a page. But in that moment when my eyes were opened it seemed you were huge, real, in ways that I was not, nor could explain. I felt flat and two-dimensional compared to you, in that eternal moment I realized you were looking in, and I was looking out.
 I was a creation, finite with limits and boundaries. And you, with all your mighty descriptions, hero of the infinite mountains, could see me. You are personal as you are infinite. You are more real than anything a thousand human minds could ever hope to compose. And I will one day rejoice to see you face to face.

Frustration

 Listen carefully: the universe is at war. Holy fire billows in the void, dark storm fronts of despair crackle and flash with all the colors of fury. Armies are sallying forth from the heavenly places, swift-footed agents escape certain capture. Legions of evils fountain up wherever the thin fabric of the mortal realm punctures, leaking across our world like a spreading pool of ink. We here in the finite world are both soldiers and battlegrounds, both waging war and being waged over.  Every little word and thought is as a bolt of fire and a thrusting sword in the reality beyond reach.

I can hear it, sometimes. The music playing in my dreams the moment before I wake. Though I can never remember the tune, my whole soul reverberates afterward. I see the effect if not the cause, like the invisible wind tossing a tree's limbs against a gun-metal gray sky.When you know you've heard the song, nothing else matters. We are notes in the song, pages in someone else's story.

Do you see it? Those rich red-brown autumn colored hills that spread off out of sight? The morning mists that hang over millponds and dewy fields? Those pale morning skies that soon give way to the deep blue of a crisp november day? They are not just in one place, nor in a single memory. They transcend memories, are too real and too big for place or time or human understanding.

I can feel it at times, mostly when I was younger. The gentle sting of a morning breeze stripping away layers of sleep. The feel of waking, of being alert and aware of wondrous things: mountain slopes and flushed dawn clouds and that wind blowing in your face. Deep oceans of peace and mountaintops of joy.

For split seconds I think I have seen the people who live in those mountains, maybe only begun to understand their majesty. Great sacrifices and burning loves and indomitable heroes are in those lands; heroes who never die and wear a thousand faces.

And so I remain, staring with hardened eyes before you, my heart filling up with sadness. It wells up from a grief at what should be, and in my childish dreams deferred they boil up as anger. No, I love you still, more perhaps as I learn more of you. But with every word, thought and deed that honors the darkness's sovereignty it grows in power over your heart, and I see the stars that shine upon you dim from a spreading cloud.

I am not some righteous bastion of faith, that need choke out my enemies like a tyrant. Evil does not offend me, it grieves me, as I watch it poison the spirit world. Colors fade, and the song from the infinite mountains grows hard to hear. I am pained, choked as if on ash by the evil that pervade us in this realm. That which serves life gives me life; that which serves death, to me, is death itself.

So please forgive me, for the sudden tempests that sweep across my face. I am weary, and walking a long road to my home.