Peace

I feel I am having a deeply profound spiritual experience. It was not provoked by long hours of meditation, a traumatic event or a supernatural epiphany. The moment itself has crept up on me and now sits cradling my heart in a way that feels like a deep love, like the kind of love you feel when you are holding your soulmate and hey are holding you, your breaths intertwine and in those few moments nothing else exists, you are sitting together, being together and you are known, you are loved, you are complete and do not need to validate, explain, apologise or rationalise yourself to them. It is deeper than them even knowing what you are thinking, it simply does not matter because you are shared. 

Right now I am shared. I sit on my own and yet I am so far from being alone. I am understood, I am held, I am loved, I am still. The peace that passes all understanding is actually tangible like a thin wafer on the tongue before it dissolves into nothing. Like a dew that hangs damp in the air, coating your breath and resting on your skin. It is a peace that is hard to describe but it is deep and it is profound. This peace reminds me what is real and what is not, what is true and what are unveiled transparent lies. It holds my gaze so still, so sharp, that the previous vibrations of life’s emotions and chaos and circumstance and opinion and the roar of media and relationships and thoughts and futures and plans and moving, they are all still. 

Stillness is so rare and yet so precious. It allows me to see, to think, to place my thoughts one foot in front of the other slowly and deliberately, without feeling dragged and pulled to skip and run in a chaotic, unplanned manner. Peace is deliberate. It is choosing, it does not force. It waits. Peace values the pause and does not see it as apathy, it sees the pause that is pregnant with every opportunity and possibility and yet unmoved by any of them, for in that moment, the pause is the nobler choice. Where the world screams at the windows that you should do this, you have to do that, you must be there - peace chooses to quietly close the shutters and sit, gazing into my eyes, waiting with me, not for something to happen, but for that moment where nothing needs to. Where complete stillness reigns once more. Where my perspective is focused entirely and completely on the eyes of the peace giver. 

We sit and gaze at each other for what feels like an eternity. His eyes never moving, piercing and yet gentle and loving. Filled with a concern, a love, a passion and a protectiveness that makes me want to look away, to cry, to do something. But I don’t move. We don’t need to. And then I am back in His arms, looking out together over a now frozen scene, sitting in our place of peace as the world is suspended, frozen in time, a million possibilities laid out simultaneously. We survey it, complete as one, breathing synchronised, aware of every muscle, heartbeat and thought. Any of the options are possible. Any of them can take us forward, I can choose, they are all exciting and blessed and overwhelming. He is with me when we walk as well as when we sit. 

But for now, I leave it suspended. I allow them to hang, mid air. While I rest a while longer in this place of prayer. 

Let me never, ever, lose this peace.