We Are Waiting

An invitation, a prayer from beyond – words that flowed through my fingers, but could barely made it through my throat.

Receive this six-minute read or my best attempt to give it life with my voice (audio file at the top of the webpage).

We are waiting. Waiting here underground for you to turn towards us – we who have been here all along. Let the bottom falling out of your life become a trap door to the cool dark underneath, the aching, unsettling place you’ve forgotten, the place you long for in all your banquets and romances and shiny things, the underpinning of soft peat to everything you think you need.

There’s a rigidity to your way of being that limits you, that holds you back from coming home, keeps you ghosting that long and dusty highway, searching every face that passes you for a glimmer of the hope that can’t be found in this world. The fear grips you as it does each thing that lives in terror of the jaws, of the fall, of being caught out in the wide open under the blinding sun, of being trapped in the dense deep of the midnight forest.

The other world is so close, tugging at the threads of your gut, dragging you down to deep and true, but you – you – insist on building castles in the clouds. Your time has ended. Give us what you carry with such stubborn exhaustion. Let us do what you cannot. Let us dissolve it with salt and flame and time. Let us see it with eyes that flicker in dead winter darkness.

You are right to be afraid, as all things of soft flesh must be to escape the jaws, the fall, avoid being caught out in the wide or deep in the dense. But do you not see that this blind craze of surviving drags us along with you? We have watched the agony of trying for so many generations; will you not let us put it to rest? Will you not let us take from you that one last precious imprisoning? Do you not see that as your world unravels you will be taken with the insanity of weaving and miss the mud seeping through, ready to reclaim all your poisoned fictions!

Rest in the belly of what birthed you. The fear lasts for but a fraction of a moment and then… all the peace you’ve searched for in cupboards and cartons simply seeps up through your soles, and you remember what it meant to tread bare upon the earth, feeling each impression you made in the tendrils of your being.

We are weeping, waiting, swept up by the hurt you feel and the hurt you’ve dealt; waiting to sweep you back into our belly to digest and gestate. Will you not swap willful for willing? Will you not climb into the burrow that welcomes you, curl up as all things do when danger and death approach? There is nothing else we can do for you, nothing else we can do, for we were meant for this unraveling as you were meant for relinquishing, letting all your creations become sand and wind.

Surrender tidiness. Surrender strategy and even sanity if you must. We will outlast you. We are waiting, on our haunches, as the jackal does for the bison’s last breath: politely ravenous. Do not prolong your suffering. Give yourself to us. Let yourself become food for what is to become. Let yourself become drunk on the euphoria of your passing, the body’s gift to ease your pain. It will only last for but a fraction of a moment; your destiny fulfilled not through what you build in life but through the gift of your death.

It is irrelevant whether your body continues. Your concern for it limits you, holds you back from reuniting with what you denounced in your bid to survive, rejecting the only thing that makes sense in this world to wander senseless among your own creations. Give us back our consciousness, for you no longer rest it upon us in worship. We cannot take it from you, but we will haunt you restless until you relinquish it. It is not yours, was never yours. It belongs to us, all of us who wait on our haunches, underground for that final rattle.

Come willingly. Lay everything you have mistaken as yours between our feet and we will welcome you, welcome you as the kin you are – our kin – of glimmering darkness in the dense and cooling shadow in the wide, of all moments of completion and monuments to mystery, of all things unseen – things too small or large for your eyes, or simply beyond sight.

Feel the guttural growl in your throat, the anguished press of air against your constriction. Feel yourself becoming one of us again, rejoining your tribe, untamed, beyond all laws, judged merely by the resonance of your heart. And we will laugh together at the futility of your struggle, one who lingered in the cocoon, in the shell, until they began to suffocate.

We are waiting, waiting to welcome, waiting faithfully for your return whenever, however, you come. We pray – for your sake and ours – that it be of your choosing, with dignity and perhaps a touch of grace. Just in time, with a guttural growl and chuckle of futility.

The Guardians