Silence Of Eagles

How many tons of rubble would one be willing to claw through to recover any remnant of any remains of loved ones or strangers?
Sitting on my back porch taking in the sounds of nature and a farm tractor turning dried grass into huge bales of hay, I wondered if I ever forgave them in a true sense? If I still harbored resentfulness, bitterness, and anger towards them. Who?, doesn’t really matter anymore. Today I realized I no longer do even though they never believed nor gave me the benefit of the doubt...not once

.
Looking back I saw the brilliance, the genius, the promises, the untapped potential trapped beneath tons of futility and despair within my own birth family. Buried beneath the same junk pile I had been under…treasures before 9/11, that I couldn’t see before. I believe we all changed profoundly that day but time would eventually unfold the untold stories within us all.

Interesting footnote: The abortion rate plummeted faster than the stock market did to nearly zero for a good while immediately after that tragic event. Heroes emerged in the aftermath of silence, common everyday people, became great people who did great things.

A few days ago I watched my fiancé gently caress the wing of a blue dragonfly that’s been coming around everyday for the last two months. i didn't think it possible till i saw it with my own eyes. We held our breaths, as she gently reached towards it and i was fully expecting it to fly off, but it stood still while she caressed it. You could have heard a pin drop, i thought i'd seen everything...

Then i remembered something i tried so hard to forget. Almost a year prior, while sitting at my kitchen table reading my bible, something caught my eye through the partially open blinds of the living room window. It appeared as though the wipers were left on in my pickup outside. I glanced over to my right side and laying on the table were my keys. Hmmm… that’s odd I thought and resumed reading. Then it happened again and again, this black line across the windshield. I put down my bible, marked the page and went outside.

It was really hot that day and I was enjoying the guilty pleasure of the air conditioning that hadn’t worked in three years because we couldn’t afford to fix it. My fiancé was in Kentucky visiting her ailing Dad who was terminally ill with cancer. I had been studying my bible in preparation to pray for him. When I walked outside of the house and over to my pickup truck, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. I leaned over from the front of the truck to see what it was. It was a large bird in the dirt road at the end of my driveway, looked like an eagle but all black except for a white ring around the neck. He was just standing there looking right at me now unflinching, it was really unnerving and surreal. Before I could even process this occurrence, something else caught my eye. The sky darkened over me for a moment and there on the ground I saw the huge shadow of a bird that circled so slowly it seemed to be hovering almost still. When I looked up, I was awestruck, dumbfounded, and at the same time questioning my sanity because it simply was the biggest living thing i'd ever seen up close in flight. It flew so low that it seemed to be grazing the chimney top of our ranch style home, i'm not ashamed to say it absolutely terrified me. It stopped circling and headed off towards the far corner diagonally of our lot. Then my attention was drawn back to the first bird, who flapped his wings a couple of times and gracefully alit upon the telephone wire overhead. I noticed that the wire had bowed beneath the weight of the bird greatly. It stood there motionless, exhibiting tremendous balance for such a large bird on such as narrow perch. Again, distracted by the other bird, I turned and looked as it flew up to the top of a telephone pole with it’s mighty back to me, then pivoted to turn towards me and gracefully alit atop the pole. I looked around to my neighbors’ houses, I looked down the street, but no one was around. "No one will believe this I thought." I ran into the house quickly to get my camera and when I came back out neither of the birds had left. So I walked slowly towards the bird on the pole, focusing my camera as I approached, keeping an eye on the the one above and beside me on the wire that seemed to monitor my every move. Mind you i was still afraid but i just was so curious at the same time! In my viewfinder i could not see anything but a kind of distortion, like a mist in the shape of what i was seeing with the naked eye, through this mist I saw the top of the pole and the leaves of a tree behind the top of the pole. I lowered my camera as I looked right at the bird. I attempted again to view it through the camera’s viewfinder with the same result. My camera was saying to me, “There’s is no bird.” and the bird seemed to say “This is only for you.”  As I lowered my camera and approached the bird, it spread out it’s wings fully. My mind was saying "you have finally snapped" Quite the converation in silence but It seemed very, very vivid...all of it!  The eagle now almost perfectly matched the symmetry of the pole and cast the shadow of a cross on the yard. I bowed my head because the sun was so bright and when I did so, I noticed that I was standing in the shadow of the cross, my knees got weak and I felt as small as the blades of grass beneath my feet. I slowly backed away, fearing to even look up again and thinking the whole time that what people were whispering behind my back and under their breaths was true,

I was indeed crazy.

Don't schizophrenics hear and see things that are not there?

Is that what my niece was trying to tell me when she had come to visit, seeing her for only the second time in more than two decades? She asked me if I knew who John Nash was?

Kept talking in circles around me making references and dropping hints?

As if toying with me like a child does when an awkward secret is just too much to hold in?

All I could think of was a taunting kind of..."I know something you don't know"

But in fact I did know...I was in the earliest stages of awakening, transforming.

I really couldn't fault her the contradiction of who i'd been in a secret life and what I was now becoming in Christ was an irony of epic proportions!

She asked me out right if I had ever seen a movie entitled "a beautiful mind?"

That was when I got my first real clue...

I pretended to play along as if i didn't know what she was talking about, she seemed to be humoring me, patronizing me and I just didn't fully get it then.

It was like a cat and mouse game she was playing with me and I felt very cornered the whole time and off balance.

I told her in depth about my awakening and what the Lord had done, how He had healed me. Restored my mind, my writing, my memories...I don't think she truly ever believed me. 

Basically laughed it off practically right to my face.

I called her to tell her what I had seen and she seemed to just kinda' humor me.

She changed the subject to re-direct me from this presumed folly and actually said that she was going to buy me a brand new semi-truck to drive for her in a business partnership.

Not only that, but also a fishing vessel for me to charter out and captain.

And I thought...hmmm....oooo....kaaaay....I....seeee.

Interesting development.

Playing into my departure from reality but actually it was a decades long round-trip.

I left that there and moved on...

I left much more than that behind me,

what else could I do?

 
I googled every large bird I could, vultures, eagles, condors… It was too big for a crow or a cormorant and it looked nothing like what I was finding. This bird looked exactly like a bald headed eagle except that it was all black with a bold white band around the collar and much larger in size. When my fiancée returned from Kentucky, she didn’t think I was crazy at all and immediately got to work researching what I had seen. I told her not to bother, I had spent two days trying to find it. She wouldn’t give up, and finally she quietly walked over to me and said, “Follow me.” She walked me over to the PC monitor, pointed to it, and said, “Is this what you saw?” My heart leaped “Yes! Yes! That’s it!” It was a black eagle native to parts of Asia and India, certainly not common to South Carolina.

Months afterwards many, many times having reflected on that encounter, two things stood out, the monochromatic ethereal quality of the blinding sunlight that day that wasn’t blinding at all but seemed to be due to my own limited perceptions. And secondly, “the silence” not a cricket, not a bird, not a car in the distance, no wind, rustle of a leaf, snap of a twig, nothing but perfect silence like stepping out of time.
Always making so much noise, asking so many questions, our minds working overtime, so many distractions, anxieties, worries…

"silence."

No matter how tragic the circumstance.

Silence.

No matter what the question.

Silence.

No matter how big the storm.

Silence.

A most peaceful...
silence...

and feeling
very
very
small

"Be still and know that I am God"
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. (Genesis 1)
Moving over the surface of the depths of our souls,
Glorious…
Omniscient…
Divine…

(…….)

(.)

I have seen many, many wonderful things since then...some witnessed by others...some photographed.

I truly feel as though all of this is merely the tip of the iceberg of what is yet to come, Amen?!

G.od I.s G.ood A.ll T.he T.ime

G.I.G.A.T.T.

"go and tell no one..."

But I know that you will, some in ridicule some in ponderence.

I don't worry about it,

worrying is a sin and a lack of FAITH.