Heaven

This used to sound stupid to me, but I’m a child of God.

I’m feeling lousy about myself today—I don’t know why. I feel lower than low.

Today, I’m desperate to feel that childlike spirit I felt continually so recently.

Today, I feel stunned into a late adulthood, one in which people aren’t trustworthy. The worst thing is, I’ve woken up to the fact that many of the people in my life were never trustworthy. However, I’m unwilling to let the trusting child within me die. I’m grabbing onto the small light of the little Dawn that will not dim, no matter what happens to me, no matter what storms I weather, walk into. The winds have blown heartily, and yet, there’s a piece of me that will always shine.

Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. –Matthew 18

Today, I sat by a small quick creek peopled with small children and a couple with fishing poles in their hands. I walked down to a place on the bank where all the people were out of sight and I watched the water run over stones, and I watched the trees. I just looked at the trees and noticed the pieces of creek I could see through the branches. I picked up a giant pine cone and I wondered where it came from. On the path to the creek, there were many very small pine cones, miniature ones, and I remembered when I was young—maybe ten years old—and I’d stand in the center of these three deodar cedar trees that somehow landed in our front lawn in Southern California, and I made up songs on the spot and I sang them—and they were lousy, trite and repetitive. But they made me happy, and I was singing for no one, I was singing for God. And I watched the rose-shaped cones from the cedar tree fall from the tree and I collected them. And I did this later when I was a grown up and lived in far West Texas, in a small town called Marfa. I collected rose pine cones and I lined my windowsills with them and I filled vases with them. And I displayed them in a kind of grand thanks—and this is how I enter heaven.

Today, I write these words, and I write myself out of this temporary hell, and I write myself into the light, and I write myself into heaven.