What happens when we listen to our truth?

In the dream, I was struggling with speech. In the most literal sense, my mouth wasn't working properly. Words were coming out sounding strange, as difficult to form as they were to understand. It was very distressing.

The slightest fissure -- a hairline fracture in a massive piece of rock -- that is the place in a piece of writing where the whole story might break wide open.

That's what I was attempting to communicate to a group of people on the other end of a group call. Words like "crack" and "hinge" held the keys to something I wanted to impart.

I live with the body memory of cracking. The fear that I ignored and buried but held for so long, that my life would be swallowed whole by that opening. And for a time, it was. What I feared came to pass. It brought many endings.

Standing in the pouring rain that night, I experienced my own death. I was reborn. I wept and wept and danced and saw it all happening. It was devastating and mystical and so much bigger than me.

"YOU HAVE TO TRUST ME." I felt the hands of God on my shoulders, firm and insistent, fierce beyond argument, and those were the words that came roaring out in my voice that was not my voice at all. I understood that it would take everything, everything ounce of trust, to move forward.

The crack. The fissure. The breaking.

Nearly nine years later, I sit here at my daughter's desk. It's a quiet morning; outside, the most subtle blush of red on the otherwise bare branches. Birdsong.

Pause.

How do we move through fear?

What happens when we can no longer push away or tamp down the truths our body carries?

What happens when we risk all of the stability and solid ground we worked so hard to build?

What happens when we listen to our truth?

I won't say something pithy like, "Life begins." It's not a hallmark card or a movie with an awesome soundtrack. No. It's something so much more multifaceted than that.

I look down to the street; the shadows of trees twisting and divergent. The shadows are not the trees, but rather evidence of the trees. It occurs to me that this is somehow important; not to mistake the shadow for the thing itself.

I return to the dream and wonder what it means.