Wait For Me

There are days — although sometimes it feels like years — when the world is going too fast for us. Some new and unfamiliar technology has been invented. Or there’s yet another geegaw developed by a wunderkind on the other side of the world we’re supposed to know about. A new disease develops. The strange disease may look like one that’s been around since the dawn of time. It may be frighteningly unknown. It may rage across countries, devastating them in its wake.

Everyone we know is talking about a new tv show, a streaming service or actors we never knew were born. If we have absolutely no clue what’s being discussed, we’re looked at like we’re either from outer space or some sort of dinosaur. Politics or wars or economies are all the news of the day and we’re hearing from the media and people we know that the world is falling apart.

Wait, we say.

Wait for me.

Sometimes it comes out a whimper. Sometimes we rage.

On a recent walk I was met with a long line of grade school children and their parents running along the path. At the end of the path a mile later I was met by a mother just beginning to run to catch up with the others. Some ten or fifteen yards behind her lagged her son, obviously exhausted.

Wait for me, he called out. Wait for me. Wait.

He called out to his mother several times. There was some reply, but by that time I had walked past and could no longer hear their words with certainty.

It was immediately clear to me, however, that those are the precise words we use on a daily basis. Not necessarily to our families or to other people, but to life. To the universe. To God. Life keeps getting away from us. Time truly does seem to take wing and fly. We feel like we will never catch up.

Then we call out for somebody or something to slow down. To wait for us. To give us time to catch our breath and return to the race.

It’s exciting when life appears to be all about gods and monsters, but our reality is in the everydayness of life. The ordinary things. There are extraordinary individuals who have the selfless ability to help people because it’s the right thing to do. Those people make it possible for me to cope with both the ordinary things and the times when I feel left behind. They wait. They help us move forward in life.

Selfless people help us by showing us how to wait for ourselves. We are all too eager to run off. We want to be at the head of the pack. To be far ahead of everyone else. We need to be the first and the best right up until the moment we fall behind.

Then we get to make choices. Do we want to try to get back to being the biggest and the best? Do we want to dare ourselves to pay attention to those people trying to show us new things in new ways?

It takes tremendous courage to stand still and wait for oneself. If we’re all on a treadmill and one person stops, everyone else is stuck behind them. A crowd forms. An uncomfortable crowd that continues to grow and push forward on the people in front.

Stepping off the treadmill at any time is courageous. We stop, but we also get off the track. We’re off the beaten path we’re told we’re supposed to walk. We’re deciding to go our own way. To relearn life in order to learn the rightness of our personal intentions.

How right are our wants? Our desires? The things we’re told we’re supposed to want?

I walked off the beaten track into the forest a very long time ago. To an extent, I followed the track as best I could. Yet, in what mattered most to me, that dearest to my heart and soul, I was gone. I was off the socially approved path.

It’s part of the freedom of being a mystic.

Yes, we get looks that question us for being who we are. People ask what sort of madness we’re up to at any time of any day. But it doesn’t matter in the long run.

When we see our angels, when we talk with them about the world in which they help us navigate, we live new lives. We don’t wait for other people who want us to catch up with them. We are well aware that they may never find where we’ve gone.

At the time I was the age of the boy calling his mother, I was terribly perplexed by humans. It was incredibly confusing to hear that my reality is not real. I was told that what we are supposed to know and believe was all theory. It does not actually manifest itself in this world.

Our spiritualities were vastly different.

What I experience isn’t theory. Seeing God, seeing angels and spirits is my reality.

And those people?

I am still waiting for them to catch up with me.