What I can’t understand is how bad things can happen while being held by an Angel, because I’m standing in the field watching small me in huge arms and for the first time in this process I’m conflicted; I want to interfere with what I’m seeing, I want to change history. I don’t want to grow up, a year to pass, that shadow man arrive, bad things to happen in a basement, I don’t want to be returned to my cot in the low-beamed cottage, I want to stay in those Angel arms forever, the late summer sun shining on a field where in winter we’ll toboggan. Yet, of all the myriad magics available, changing the course of history is not one of them. Events happen. And what difference will it make now, in the replay of this block universe where my birth and death and yours and everything in-between is happening all the time and all at once? That these subtle changes are made, I’m held now, not so alone yet still I must go through it, blows my mind; it’s a circle I’m finding it very hard to square. Yet Andy and I spoke yesterday of humans, how given self-consciousness, the skill to shake off trauma, still innate in other animals, was lost to us, how we must consciously remember to do it, and how we don’t. And these are the differences we make in this work, to go back to the beginning of the universe and do it right this time, not change events but witness them at their right size and act accordingly, be there for ourselves, shake out the terror and invasion, these are the differences that our bones remember. Yesterday I said it felt like walking through cobwebs in the dark, these sensations I had no names for in the preverbal messiness of the before, and last night I dreamt I was in the kitchen of my father’s cottage and my leg was covered in hard bubbles of spider bites. It had orange stripes on its legs, I saw it disappear down a crack in the floor, I ran for a candle, I would pour wax after it, seal up the hole, and this time I could see the trails of its silk everywhere, reaching from the window across low-beamed ceiling, wafting in the breeze from an open window. I climbed the steep stairs to bed. I had sensations everywhere. Winter is coming to that cottage in the country. The windows will be shut, and the curtains drawn. There will be a fireworks party. There will be Christmas.
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This was so powerful, eerie, beautiful. I loved the image of the spider's silk.
The imagery of standing in the field, held by an Angel, and the desire to alter the course of history while being unable to do so conveys a profound sense of vulnerability and yearning. Your ability to articulate complex feelings and weave them into a narrative is truly captivating.