Sight to See ~ Chapter 1 Choices

It’s unsettling to feel that you haven’t made choices in your life, as much as events and people choosing you. It began 450 years ago really and yet only thirty years ago on the day I was born. It began with my name; Dawn. I came into this world with the first light of dawn, amidst my mother’s screams and pain. My head emerged and the sun rose. That’s just how it happened. I didn’t choose it.

As soon as she saw me and then the sun she said she knew my name was Dawn. She said there wasn’t a choice; it was just my name. She said my name chose me.

I’ve gotten more used to the feeling that I’m not making the choices in my own life but it is still unsettling. When something chooses you, people often call it a “gift”. Many of my gifts I’m not sure I wanted; my name not the least of them.

Most gifts that you don’t want you can return and while you might feel a twinge of guilt, still you are able to return them. My gifts are unreturnable, final sale items. I’ve tried to put them in a drawer and ignore them. One in particular I’ve tried to ignore since my childhood. Only much too late did I realize that it leaves me feeling incomplete. So since I was eight I’ve lived with the feeling that there is a part of me that’s missing, something essential. In truth, part of me knows that it’s not missing I have simply chosen not to remember it. See what happens when I make the choices?

So now I am searching, or more accurately, stumbling blindly. My sight is hindered by the muted, gray light of the dawn that I was born into. I’m unable to focus. The objects in my path have no distinct edges or shapes. I’m just waiting for the light to rise so that I may see more clearly what lies ahead. Whether or not my vision clears I feel compelled to continue searching for something to fill up the empty space I’ve created within myself. And yet I’m afraid of finding it. Afraid of the force with which the vacuum will be filled.

Despite my fears something calls to me from my dreams. It wanders through them like a phantom, calling first from far and then from near; shapeless, hovering at the fringes of my memory. It beckons to me to follow down a path I’m not certain I want to tread.

I know I’m nearing the truth though, because the voice is becoming more insistent, coming more often from nearby than far away, coming from within my own head, my own heart. Its shape is becoming more solid, more substantial.

Really it’s she, not it. I can’t yet see her clearly in this light, but I can feel her hanging just beyond my sight; also waiting for the full light of dawn. I can feel her presence in the stifling air. She is a storm on the horizon of my life. I can feel her power building as I approach and I am drawn to it like the moth to the flame; possibly with the same consequences.

She points to the power within me. She calls me to choose finally for myself, to make the choices that lay before me. To gratefully accept or return the gifts that are mine.