ezekiel saw the wheel

barreling along the New York Throughway, listening to a mix cd that my sister made a few years back, something happened. I was driving through one of those cuts in a hillside, the ones where you can see the layers of rock, a snapshot of millions of years, a history written in schist and quartz pressed and lifted and pressed again, and only a comparative nanosecond ago blasted apart by insects that felt a need to lay a ribbon of asphalt just there.

These strata became threads in a tapestry, and then I realized that I am a thread, too, and then I was almost outside of myself, looking back at myself as a thread in this tapestry, my beating heart woven into the warp and my arms and legs stretching out as weft, reaching back, back, back, woven in with growth rings of trees and layers of rock, woven in with water wheels spinning wet around and around and with the lines hauling up the square sail on a trireme, woven in with hands and arms painting massive animals on cave walls and chipping flint arrowheads. Then I looked forward and saw my arms woven with Karen’s and with the arms of our son, and the thread weaving forward and forward through time that we can not know, to a time when our son is a great- great- grandfather, a time when we are impossibly far back, yellowed photographs that no-one really believes.

As I zoomed back and back and back, I saw the whole tapestry, stretching up and down and left and right, on and on and on beyond my ability to see, and lost my self in it, and lost everything that I could recognize, and just saw this massive, multi-colored tapestry that is all of us, those that have been, and we who are now, and those that will come, all here, all at the same time, and it was breathtaking.

In a flash it was gone, and I was barreling along the New York Throughway, listening to a mix cd that my sister made a few years back, driving through one of those cuts in a hillside. Tears were running down my face and it was hard to catch my breath. It has taken me much longer to write about this than it took for it to happen. It has taken you much longer to read this than it took for it to happen. It all was there in between two beats of a song. In between two breaths. But it was real, I felt it and saw it and am still trying to figure out why.

I am not a terribly religious person. If I was, I would describe it as a vision, in the manner of Old Testament prophets. I might call it a moment of clarity, a moment of understanding. I still feel it, a little, a day later. Like a bruise, sort of, but a bruise somewhere in my heart or (dare I say it) soul.

I know and believe that our knowledge of and respect for our history is the best possible guide for moving forward. I know that we are all connected and that we all have a deep and abiding responsibility to every other thread in that tapestry. I know that I will never be able to comprehend how far-reaching my choices can be, and that my life needs to be lived in awareness of all of this. I am not sure what to do with this moment, this vision. I am still working it out. But I am honored that I saw what I saw.

Ezekiel saw the wheel
Way up in the middle of the air.