When they walk with you

Right now I am spent, feeling like I have swum several miles in strong cold seas. I am free of stress, of fear, and with the trembling fulfillment that usually is found only after long hard dirty sex. I should feel empty inside since He is no longer filling me, but I feel really strongly centered in myself instead.

How it came to pass:

In my lovely town, the suburbs that once were what the 50's promised have become the site of commercial grow ops and rival "business interests". I do delivery at night, and last week got jumped by a grow-op guard dog that had wandered off premises. Tensions rose as police and animal control doccumented that this animal has attacked people before (although I was the first person to get steel into it in return), but could not get the owners cooperation in controling it (thanks guys, good to know you won't do anything when/if I call). Last night a man was shot five times for being in the wrong place at the wrong time; the same place and about the same time I must be every night.

Oddly enough this simplified things. I cleaned my weapons and prepared myself to receive fire, to attack through any ambush with maximum violence as per the doctrine I was trained in, and put into practice so many times. As I set out in the dark, I felt Odin filling me. My night sight improved, not only the distance and clarity improved, but the field of view and degree of detail expanded in all directions. My sense of hearing and smell regained the acuity the city generally robs us of, and my body moved with a loose grace that so little resembled the bear like shamble I generally move with. I was at peace, tranquil and with laughter so close beneath the surface. A simple uncomplicated joy filled me, like the feeling of undoing your first girlfriends bra or your first sip of fine single malt far older than you are.

I encountered an SUV filled with our commercial recreational entrepreneurs and as they glared at me I laughed and moved easily to my weapons with the same cold feeling of bliss that you feel running through the sprinkler or stepping into air conditioning on a hot day. I was filled with power, arrogant beyond belief, with the utter assurance that all four of them were mine any time I chose and nothing they could do could possibly slow or stop me. No assurance of survival, the question honestly seemed somehow beneath me at the time.

What did they see? A balding fat man long past his prime without even the visible weapons they showed? Why did the man in the passenger seat go pale and tell the driver who pulled up so challengingly to gun it and get out of there. I doubt it was me. Odin was so strong in me at the time that perhaps even those spirit dead scum could feel his presence. Hail the Battleglad, praise to the Feeder of Ravens who so clearly determined it would not be I who fed the ravens this night.

I am exhausted now. I feel wrung out like a sponge. Still, there are echoes of the ice cold lightning of his presence still flickering around my system. I am just myself again, but even that is perhaps more when he left it than when he came.

Tremendous.

John T? Your telling of self, physically, mentally, & spiritually is so amazing ly uplifting! You truly walk your path, my friend.

Amazing story, John! Thanks for sharing!

It sometimes humbles me to think that something so much vaster and more powerful than us even cares enough to notice, let alone intervene for us. The fact that something inside us can share that divine touch, even at the farthest remove, remains a gift whose meaning and implications we may never finish discovering.

I have wielded weapons our ancestors would have sworn were the power of the gods themselves. Our technology can reshape even life itself to our needs, and yet we are such small things in this universe. Cities and nations can be swept away by forces in this world that don't even notice the mightiest of our works. Occasionally we are blessed with the touch that reminds us that small as we are, we are neither alone, nor forgotten.

It is the simple things in life that we discover through our very selves. The oneness that amazes me. The simple things that stirs the very essence of all of creation. May it be the scent of rain, the view of the cosmos above, the touch of a loved one, the taste of salty tears or the tranquil movement of lasting silence. Taking the all within us is mystical, magical, invigorating, & so soothing from head to toe & from with out to within. To become as one is beyond words.
You, John T, gave us such a tiny uplifting peek!