MUDDY WATERS
If you stand on the very edge of the dock and gaze intently below, your eyes can cut through nearly ten feet of green-blue water before the murky depths cloak what lies beneath.
There are those who have turned “murky” into big business, their words scattering to and fro like sunlight dancing on the waves. It’s easy to become mesmerized by the shifting shadows on the surface, our sleepy minds, drifting, “only just a little” we reassure ourselves.
I have tried to give up coffee, sometimes several times in just one week. This morning I am loading heaping teaspoonfuls of my latest surrogate {Mud Wtr} into creamer with little hope that there is legitimate replacement for that irreplaceable clarity of mind that genuine java brings.
“Clear as mud,” my daddy used to say upon listening to the endless stream of words strewn together on the six o’clock news. I learned early to beware of those whose sentences twist and turn like long lazy rivers intended to pacify and confuse.
The masters of “irrelevant,” stir up the mucky sediment to make us doubt what we think or see. When those with covert agendas begin muddying the waters, I anchor myself in me... and I hear the whispers of the girl, the woman, the person I have always been.
There are no murmurings more convincing than the conversations I have with myself, even from the time I was a child.
The echoes of our own lifetimes are wise and wondrous teachers patiently guiding us to the revelation of ourselves.
This is the week we buried my daddy’s oldest sister, Mary Elizabeth Knox Knight, in her beloved New Orleans. Knox blood. Thick as Mississippi mud. Mary is still alive in her brother’s daughter—same long narrow nose, same lanky shape. It occurs to me now that ninety-six years is an awfully long time for living and learning, at least that’s my latest perspective having recently become even more abundantly grateful for every single breath.
These are the thoughts that drift in and by like GOLDEN lakes waiting with their AGELESS wisdom, if only we will walk away from the unceasing chatter and float beneath an infinite sky.
I used to be afraid of the muddy waters, not knowing what was lingering just under my feet. But I am of the kind of stock that survives Kansas Tornadoes and Louisiana hurricanes, even a little cancer here and there.
Proverbs says, “like a muddied spring or a polluted well, is a righteous woman who succumbs to the wicked,” but I will not give way. “Many things can contaminate the flow of the pure living waters in our lives and put us back on that dirty river.”
I step to the water’s edge and remind myself what it feels like to be immersed in Him.
Pure. Living. Waters. What I long for couldn’t be more clear.
