The Raven's Flight

 

To an angel the lie of linearity isn’t necessarily a destructive thing, Kara. Though we exist beyond the usual strictures of spacetime, we are all too aware that mortals don’t. They abide by its rules and are governed by its laws. And though angels circle in a dreamtime beyond conventional causality, we are still heavily influenced by it. A true being of light is a friend to humanity, and humans love to tell stories. Those stories are incomprehensible without convention. Thus, to truly know mankind, angels must know linearity. What it feels like to begin, to be in the middle of, and to end. Of course, beginnings and endings are mere abstractions conjured by an incomplete grasp of birth and death. So, the truth – as with most things – is somewhere in the middle. In Medias Res, as the Arcs among the Auguries are fond of pointing out.

The adventurer in me likes to put it another way though: the journey outlives the destination. A traveller’s logic to be sure but a sound approach, nonetheless. Did you know that each feather of an angel’s wing is someone’s dream? In this world or any other? These are the secrets of the Innermost. Myriad, and multitudinous. Without the depth of such dreaming an angel can only ascend so high. But with a storytelling forged of true character, true wit and imagination – those bright ones are borne aloft amid the highest strata of consciousness. So, Kara, I want you to understand that you pre-existed your conception and shall long outlive your destruction. This is the immortality of the human soul. The grace bestowed by our Father. We change, my friend. But we never truly perish. Sometimes it seems a gulf or epoch exists between the people we were and the person we are now. Those former selves can seem like distant dreams in the miracle of light, yet there is nothing but continuity. Even in apparent discontinuities of darkness.

My seamstress, my explorer of the edges, the threads of fate and temporality are woven by all of us in tandem. I am more than just one man, as you are far more than just one woman.  We are, all of us, birthed and guided by that great mystery that we call God. Source, creator, divine intelligence. Some style him as masculine, others feminine. Some give him the behaviours and mythologies of mortals, to better tell those stories I spoke of. Stories grounded in convention, yet reaching toward the numinous or inexplicable. Sometimes we can sense spiritual forms by placing them against the context of things readily perceived. After all, the strange becomes stranger amid the ordinary. Kara, we are so much more than mothers, daughters, poets or kings. Do you know it yet? Have I helped you to better imagine, even slightly? I hope so. We are all winged travellers, eternal. Forever soaring on the winds of dreamtime. Shifting, changing, becoming new. Who we are informs who we soon become. Do you want to know the greatest secret of all? None of this is possible without love, without relationship. We are all nurtured, tended, and healed by our family and friends, aren’t we? Coloured by the company we keep. Mortals and angels alike. So, let’s choose our companions with kindness, and offer them an equal companionship in return. The kind of grace our father offered when he forged us from flame, stories and mud.