in-the-fullness-of-time-012007.mp3
i am smiling. the phrase that titles this post is one that, since the first i ever heard it, some 32 years ago, has been something of a thorn.
i first heard it at church. the church the children’s home made us attend. i was too young to even grasp what it meant, but it just sounded so pompous at that moment. i thought it so even before i knew the word ‘pompous’. i didn’t need to know the word to feel/sense the tone in which it was said.
every time i have ever heard the phrase since, every, single, time, it has been said in precisely the same way. it’s weird. no matter who said it, no matter time, circumstance, and regardless my relation to the situation or sayer.
it has always been someone telling someone else in a certain, knowing, feeling full of their knowing kind of way.
and you know what? i think over the last year, here and there, trying to get my head around various things, i may even have accidently used it myself. someone i knew (or thought i did) had a very bad habit of saying it (in this way, yes) and somehow i found a fascination with it that was almost as pitiful as the fascination i held with the one saying it.
the kind of fascination one has for a weaving cobra… you get lost in the grace of the movement and forget that it’s swaying in pursuit of the best place to put its fangs into you. you fasten and focus on the beauty, or the potential for it, and you forget that this thing is driven by instinct, reflex, and a series of intentions you can only guess at… never know.
which is, of course, why i was so surprised to find two red marks. and poison in my veins.
but i digress. old history. water under the bridge. lanced, drained, and released. soon to be forgotten.
anyway. yes. i too, have used it in such pitiful fashion.
but that is why i am smiling in this moment. because in this moment, i find a way to use it that has nothing to do with certainty, in fact, is so grounded and founded in the wonder of not knowing a thing and not expecting to ever know a thing that i’m mildly boggled for how well it fits, works, and just…. says everything that needs to be said.
heh. all of the above being a preface, i sheepishly grin and then… undertake to actually tell this.
for most of my life, i have never had a sense that there could be a ‘fullness of time’, which i always interpreted as ‘any moment in which some possibility could be discovered and known’. so whenever i have heard it, naturally, it has sounded off, off-key, out of kilter, and inherently wrong. because… even young and ignorant… or older and ignorant… or right now and ignorant, of those few things i have ever felt i really ‘know’ has been the sense of certainty that i don’t know very much at all, and most things i think i know, i’m wrong about… and that the act of proclaiming knowing, itself, is very likely more an indicator of inability to continue looking than actively knowing.
conversely, and perhaps paradoxically, i have also ‘known’ that so long as i continue to insist upon being unknowing, the infinite river of possibility remains. that the only chains of ignorance in which i am ever bound are those i shape and create and place around things, others, and mind itself in the attempt to feel as if i ‘know’ anything whatever.
(mind you, this said in…. full knowledge…. (grin) that this is, at best, a momentarily clarity and, as so many things in a human life, it will pass. and i will be foolishly ‘knowing’ at any moment… perhaps even before i end this piece. ah, humanity.)
but in this moment, i have a small sense of understanding this phrase. because in this moment, i have connected with someone who, in every moment since knowing them, has tenderly, kindly, compassionately, caringly, lovingly, thoughtfully, attentively, consistently, and utterly demonstrated to me that there is a point in time when the fantasy-dream-hope of ever connecting with another in this way could be happen.
i have always believed this manner of connection is possible. i have actively sought it with every other i meet. every. single. one.
and in all my forty and one years, i have never found it. never felt it. never known it.
until now.
i have felt its possibility very keenly in some moments. i have felt in many moments that it hovered just… out… of… reach.
and for a very long time, i have very likely shattered that possibility completely by lunging for it. oh, so human. pitiful, really.
i have set some priceless friendships into impossibility with such lunging toward possibility.
i have hurt some priceless others with such eager, giddy lungings.
in this moment, i have such remorse for those lungings. but i also see how the process of it all brought me to this place, this moment, in which, finding another pristine, perfect, shining diamond of possibility, somehow, almost in spite of myself (perhaps that is much more accurate than i realize when i type it), it is managed to still that coiling and, while yet trembling with the desire to lunge, instead, hold… still… steady… focus on the breath… and let it be as it is, as it will, whatever that is, or will be.
i have deliberately refrained from as much as whispering about this for some months now… not wanting to set any ripple into the waters that might disturb or destroy something i find… incredible, amazing, astonishing, perfect, beautiful, healing, giving, blessing-balm-succor-redeeming-gift.
and here, now, in this moment, shakily and with so much mindfulness of what is being said and why… with all this preface, disclaimer, leagues upon leagues of distance between my silly, sad, self and it… softly… reverently… slowly… finally… i feel some small degree of understanding of what beauty is in the fullness of time.
the name this life gives him is Rick. it makes me laugh. this name is one i have before known… even as i knew it not as it now arrives. the last Rick i knew took me fourteen years to move beyond. and even then, it was only another diamond appearing on the horizon that managed it. and even then, it was still me lunging for it that actually achieved that movement at all.
and now, another… and at last, i choose more wisely. in the fullness of time, all things.
and i smile.