If you look closely …

If you look closely you’ll see a ring of guardians standing around you. To look closely in this case doesn’t mean to squint, or even to soften your gaze and let everything blur so that the invisible comes into focus. No, this is a different kind of looking. The hardest kind. How easy it is to forget how held we are. How protected. How cheered.

It took my friend Justin reminding me yesterday that he is one of the many who stands in my circle, like a ring of redwoods. A population of spirits: living, dead, yet to incarnate, or just fine to hang out on the other side for all eternity. They are layers deep. If you look closely you see their faces, one at a time, many at once.  

You see their hands, held in one another’s, held up in blessing, busy knitting or painting, or with birds perched on their fingers. Beckoning. Patiently unlocking the cages you insist on building and rebuilding. Sometimes striking matches and burning them down. All the better to see them, my dear.

Ah, you are starting to see now, aren’t you? Just like time itself, lineage is not linear. It is a ring. A series of rings. Ever-widening circles, as Rilke says. That persistent spiral – the shape that everything takes, if you look closely.

They stand near, and far, and as you make the circuit of your life—moving farther each time from the core wound, but visiting it again, repeatedly, endlessly—you also pass each of them.

They offer a hug, a handshake, a bow, a good, long look into their eyes – into their own memories of forever, the galaxies they’ve traveled to – and you remember that you are oh so small and you are never, ever alone.

If you look closely you’ll see that the center of you has its own eyes, ones that know where you came from and where you’re headed. It pulls you to the ones who remember when you forget. Who utter, “I am here, and I always will be.” And with those words a light flicks on, and suddenly you needn’t look closely any longer. You can see them perfectly well.