"The Light On the Lake" (More Tales of Power)

It was a certain way the light hit the lake, the way the sun bounced off the little chops on the surface of the water. No way to describe it, really. A hundred different elements had all come into play with just the right timing. A pale silver mist, not quite fog, not quite cloud. Scent of cut grass. Hint of mystery on the wind.

Just words, meaning nothing.

What seemed to matter was the fact that it caused my breath to catch in my throat. Suddenly I was 17 again. Back on the shore of some half-remembered lake in Florida when I was still just a girl, chasing bullfrogs and courting the nagual without having a name for it.

It was an afternoon when I had cut school with one of the local boys. Doug, I think his name was. We snuck off to a lake that had no name, floated out to the center of the water on a cheap raft, and spent the day talking about whatever it is that teenage kids talk about.

What I remember about that day was looking toward the shore and noticing how the trees grew almost to the water's edge. The shadows. Thick and black and inviting - far more inviting, even, than the embrace of the handsome young man in whose arms I was lying. He was known somehow. No mystery. The shadows and the orange groves and the black bottom lake were the mystery, calling forth something in me that I had never felt before in quite that manner, until that afternoon on the lake.

I knew then, somehow, that I would never be completely content. No man would ever be enough. No friend would ever know me as I wanted to be known. And yet...

There was something in the shadows that knew me. There was something in the trees that was kindred.
And for a moment, today, I found myself back in that assemblage point... overwhelmed with that sense of wonder and awe and melancholy perfection which simply cannot be spoken of except in 3 a.m. campfire whispers. For a moment, the world stopped, and I was neither Della-the-girl, nor Della-the-woman. I was simply - somehow - the synapse of energy between the two assemblage points. I was the manifestation of the unknown, reaching across the void to BE the shadows which have drawn me to this moment, to become the light on the lake, reflecting back and forth between then and now and then and the infinite.

For that moment, I knew my name... written in a language of light on the lake, and the shadows that lie beyond.
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Journal Entry, September 30, 2007
Copyright 2015, by Della Van Hise
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