Digging through lies you created to hide your True Self,

you may find God.

Or something much better.

 

Chapter Eight

 

An instant spray of sparkle spat outward across the pond.

Gentle footprints of ripple wavered, dissolved, fading away to rich green stillness. All the world was ripening, finding its form, as the scent of new birth hid in breezes.

Paulette poked through the rubble left by long years of misconceptions she had once built her life on. By water’s edge she kicked through the jetsam of defensiveness she no longer need. Budding here and there throughout the wreckage she found the delicate florets of long-hidden kindnesses, just now peeking out through deep shadows.

Harve felt caught up in a web of lies the world really wanted, even needed to believe. They told him to his face, announced in banner headlines, that their world needed heroes. So in some muddled and disheartened way, he kept climbing into the costume they held out before him.

He couldn’t abandon them now.

Confession would get him nowhere; it would hurt a lot of people.

He was trapped.

And yet here was a woman to whom he had just bared his soul throughout a long night of impassioned weakness, and she seemed to understand. She stood beside him still.

In fact they seem to have connected even more deeply than if he had just stayed Mr. Mystery, or played the hero card.

Throughout this morning they’d been wandering. Heading off originally, each had followed his or her own directions, seemingly at random. Bit by bit their paths had drawn nearer to each other. Now the two new and tentative companions walked together, though not directly side-by-side, and barely talking.

Walking, pausing, reflecting; staring at trees right in front of them, or rocks at their feet, but not truly seeing them. They felt stunned, unnerved; bemused as things seen and unseen fell into new places. Like leaves after a great troubling wind. They felt both drained and refilled; alive with new mysteries and possibilities.

Like newborns, everything was new, bright, wondrous, but confusing. Nothing made sense, and yet they had to learn to trust, their hearts surging everywhere at once. This was a brand new world they knew nothing about.

After long silence between them, Paulette spoke.

“It’s so hard to find out all in one night you’ve built your life on beliefs that were just never true.”

“Tell me about it.”

– From my novel, “The Gardens of Ailana”.