Socorro, New Mexico lapsed into familiar early morning languor.
Dreaminess floated down from the lemon sky into her back garden. She sat with a mug of coffee in cool sunrise shadows.
The barking of a nearby dog was accompanied by a sudden jolt of discomfort. It was an unmistakable sense of being adrift, accented by feelings of being alone.
What startled her was the arrival of an uninvited outlook. Something she could never have imagined the day before.
It only took her a moment to decide she was quite comfortable minus moorings. She was fine untethered. She didn’t mind being adrift at all.
Only a moment ago she would have considered her obligations as necessary, even somewhat honorable.
She had found meaning through the tendons that connected her to every strand of life.
She sat in the shadows sipping the coffee and felt every tendon dissolve, as if the tissue liquefied, floating into the lemon sky over Socorro, New Mexico.
One by one, visions of her relationships appeared.
She watched in awe as the ties that bound her to each one snapped then vanished. A parade of friendships of differing depths and durations passed by. So did images of her family members.
Nothing had happened to tarnish the quality or the meaning of all these relationships. What changed, and what she felt so unmistakably, was where she fit in.
She felt as if she was monitoring the instrument that measured the recent earthquake in El Centro, California. Suddenly she was able to gauge her meaning to others.
If this had always been possible, why had it only come to her now? Such a curious moment. Such an unexpected revelation.
In a way she wished this had appeared in a dream. She wondered if she was, at that very moment in her garden dreaming, which brought to mind what Novalis wrote…
“When we dream that we are dreaming the moment of awaking is at hand.”
But she was a practical woman. She knew full well this was no dream.
