Summer Dreams

If I sat at my Heavenly Father's feet right now, and if He weren't too busy with a war or tornado, I'd touch his knee and ask Him: "Should I be afraid?'
I don't know what He'd answer. I can't hear Him. He is silent on this point. I wonder if He has ever been afraid, and if so, whom did He ask? Whose knee did He lean against? Is there another God above our God?

 I feel inept today. Just out of my reach, just beyond my fingertips is some great and wonderful "thing." I can feel it, at certain times more than others. But I can't take hold of it. It does not fill me up like I know it can. When I look at a flower in my garden, a sunflower that grows all by itself with no help from me into this delicate red fragility, I still can't reach inside it and grasp its fullness. A veil hangs there. Sometimes a moon shines through the trees in my backyard, and I watch it as it moves from branch to branch. But I watch it from a distance. It isn't really mine. And I ache with longing for more. I want more of the moon, more of its roundness and glow, more of the symmetry of moons and trees. A cat brushes up against my leg, I can feel him moving as he twists back again and rubs his head against my Levis with some kind of energy called "life," which is . . . what? This energy, this life, that I can sense is running, little by little, out of me with every passing year.

I used to dream of such high things, but, I can't remember these dreams; I can only remember their intense possibility, the endless hope of some grand destiny, the sense that nothing was impossible, nothing would be left undone. I do not remember fear. I remember the confusion, a lack of direction, complications, but I didn't care. It was just the stuff that came along with the dreams. I sensed even then that a god was my father, and that He was caring for the universe while I skipped along in my little bubble of happiness--glad for a body that could run and sing and dance. He would smooth out the path and be around every corner to protect and lift and lead.
. . . .

 But He didn't protect us . . . or rather, maybe, we really didn't understand the reality of living--its ups and downs, and swirls of light in the darkness, and endless hell.  I'm glad I took pictures in my mind of those hopeful times because they passed quickly.

 I've heard His voice before.
 It is out of this longing for his presence again that my writing comes. . . . Is anybody here?