Life has started to return to normal, well, "my" normal anyway, but any of you who are American women of a certain age may understand that the real story went deeper. I have the feeling that when my little mystic, brilliant, musical, creative soul was born into 1956 America with its shiny kitchen appliances and shiny teeth and shiny cars and moms in aprons and dads in suits and briefcases, she immediately broke into hundreds of pieces from shock. Talk about an energetic mismatch. And I've been carrying the pieces around ever since in kind of a metaphoric knapsack, sure that this had all been a mistake, that I was born on the wrong planet and wanted to go home. Yet somewhere around age 55, I think it finally dawned on me that if I was still alive (and I was) I really was on the right planet and if nothing else, at least I had to try to sew the pieces back together. These last few years have been a valiant and, at times, balancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin scary effort to do that, which my blog posts have attempted to chronicle. Yet two sides of the quilt were irreconcilable. No matter how strong my thread, the edges would fray then break back into two distinct panels.
By what grace did I wake up last Monday morning with the right words in my head? I scrambled to find my journal and pen and scribbled them down. Then within a few hours, I wrote the blog post. And here's the deal. A week has now passed, and the seam is still holding. I still understand, and feel in my heart, the place where the almost-500-year-old choral evensong tradition overlaps with my 21st century woman's soul. I'm still holding my breath. After all, life is about a million times more complex than it was in 1956. My quilt feels extremely fragile. But so far, I am in one piece. The stitching has held. All my pieces are back together. I may be, just may be, reborn, at 61-going-on-62.
That's the real miracle of it all.
