It blurs from the edges in...

My past several (few that seem like several) days have blended into each other so much I have to check the calendar to make sure I know when now is. Silent retreats can produce an altered state, much like labyrinths or isolation tanks or drugs. For me, time is the most deeply affected... my sense of it, anyway.

When the daily structure is removed, my internal rhythm makes its own will evident. I recognized this before when I was unemployed... I took naps in the afternoon and stayed up much later than normal. Some of this pattern has surfaced again because my room is so cold. I make my bed in the morning, but am back under the covers before noon. I read, knit, read some more... and eventually fall asleep. I have vivid dreams I don't remember. I leave my room only on the briefest of forays... to eat, dump the trash, work on the creche pieces down in the art room. I went outside for a walk the other day and almost froze to death, nothing I care to repeat anytime soon.

Mine is a corner room on the fifth floor. I hear the wind whipping over the roof above, and two of my walls face the outside. My window is large and in other seasons lets in a golden light. In winter the light is gray and cold. The other day (which one?) I remembered a turret room in a house I lived in as a teenager. I appropriated that turret room one fall and hauled my desk up there to be a writer, to live like Jo March in Little Women. I had a fountain pen that leaked and left my fingers black just like hers. I did well in my little attic garret until winter came. The same howling wind and freezing windows drove me back downstairs to the relative warmth of civilization. So much for fantasies.

I've finished reading The Secret Magdalene by Ki Longfellow, yet another take on who Mary Magdalene might have been. Now that the Da Vinci Code's uproar has abated, stories are coming out of the woodwork that publishers would have rejected as unthinkable before Dan Brown's smashing success.

The truth is, they are all dead... all those apostles and disciples and early followers of Christ. We have no clue who they really were or what they truly witnessed or believed. We have only our own relationship with our creator, whoever or whatever that may mean to us in this time and this place. Who we choose to be and with whom and by what power will probably also be misrepresented by future generations. So what is important is now. Now, as I am experiencing it, blurs from the edges in. It's quite beautiful.