ARC

Once upon a time there was an arc, defining points in my journey through the Underworld. Two of these are days 135 and 3581. This story builds on katabasis.

In order to take you there, I need to introduce a second metaphor. Imagine a large museum and in it, a small chamber. When I open the door it reveals a dark room with discreet lighting and thick, burgundy, velvet curtains. Pulling them aside we step in and there you see it: a large, beautiful tapestry hanging in the midst of the room. That tapestry is my life.

As I revisit my journals – which I often do – I observe aspects of my tapestry that were not apparent while I was living them, I can look at episodes in my life from the ‘face’ or the ‘back’ of the tapestry, what it took to weave that section, its complexity. I trace my fingers over threads of particular colours and follow their trajectory. I detect patterns of how those threads intersect with others and form shapes. These threads are motifs that appear and reappear in the things I read, hear, think, conversations I have, the things I sense in a variety of ways in the world around me.

I am about to invite you into this inner sanctum. I want to share with you a section of that stunning tapestry; take off your shoes, we are on holy ground. Tread lightly and handle gently – that is my heart in your hands.

***

Day 135.

It is a regular evening in the city of Aden, I am sitting on the floor of my bedroom, painting. I receive a text message. I feel sad and immediately I begin to cry, I cannot stop. It becomes apparent to me that this is no normal sadness.

I am crying in agony, my heart in fragments on the floor. Suddenly my head is spinning, I can’t breathe properly, I feel like I am dying. I collapse into a heap on the floor, lying unable to move. I have no idea what is happening, only that it is something beyond me. This is unlike any other time I have been in pain and cried. Something is different and I know it.

The crying now dissipates, but I need to capture this in my journal while I am still in it, because I know it is important. With the little strength I have, I reach to my journal, and manage to pen the words below. With my head on the ground and my body immobile bar the hand that writes, I can barely see what I am scratching onto this page.

“At this moment I am literally dying. This is it. This is the night I die. It’s breaking. My heart is exploding into a million pieces. I feel so physically ill. Legs numb, feeling faint, weak, no life energy in me. It’s leaving my body. I’ve laid me down to die. The very life within me leaves me, I can feel as it slowly ebbs away, my soul is bleeding out. For 135 days now I have done nothing but search for the truth with all my heart and soul. This is the moment of truth, the hour has come. All I can do now is wait.”

As soon as I write these words suddenly something shifts inside, quite inexplicably – a peace very palpably washes over me, a calm. Nothing external triggered it, this is sure. It just sweeps over me and I lie there in disbelief. I keep writing:

“This is the epicentre of the hurricane, the peak of the storm. I strangely feel a calm. Though I know it’s technically the climax, the peak, the bull’s eye, I strangely feel as though I’m on the other side of the storm, that it’s over. Day 25, Jer. 6:16.* I am in the moment of unveiling. ‘Tvoja pobeda je Hriste, venac slave krasi te! Tvojom smrcu na Golgoti ti sad mozes spasti sve. Slavim te, o Spase dragi, jer si za me raspet ti, ti si svojim vaskrsenjem jemstvo moje vecnosti.’”**

After that shift, I feel my energy gently begin to return and after a time, I slowly sit up. I am exhausted, wrecked. I need just silence. I carry on painting. I have no idea what just happened. I finish my painting, putting my brushes down. It is now 1:30am. I reach for my journal again and write about what has just happened. I need to capture these things raw, in the pure emotion of it, and this time of painting has given me the minimum energy needed.

Remember these threads. Now come with me and look here at another portion of the weave.

Day 3581.

I am in the midst of a tragedy, a shocking seismic shift that is changing my world. As I am crying in agony I realise I have lived this before, I have already felt this on my skin. I have already felt this explosion, my heart in fragments on the floor. I have already cried these tears. In that moment I remember that hot August night a decade earlier, and I suddenly know what it was – it was this. It was this, in advance. It was an embodied foreshadowing of what was to come many, many, years later. Although I am still too raw and too broken to fully understand it, it blows. my. mind. Now I am crying because of my broken heart and because I am shocked by this realisation, by the beauty and insanity of it all.

***

Those two days are like foundations that underpin a narrative arc spanning three thousand days. They roughly mark the beginning of my descent, and the beginning of my ascent. This is the beauty of this tapestry: just over a hundred days into my journey, I experienced a micro version of what I had, unbeknownst to me, already begun living at a macro level: katabasis, experiencing death in order to become fully alive. I experienced a micro story that was a macro story about to unfold over the next decade. Imagine reading an abstract and then reading the full article.

In those few days after Day 3581 I was reminded of the biblical character Joseph - he has a dream in which his family bows down before him. He is ridiculed and despised because of his dream. It makes no sense. He is sold as a slave and goes on to live in a place far from his homeland. More than two decades later – in a time of great famine and through a riveting sequence of events – Joseph is governor of Egypt and his brothers arrive from his homeland seeking to buy food. It is in that moment – when they enter and bow before him – that he remembers the dream. In that moment it all comes together, in that moment he finally knows what it all meant. In that moment he knows that God had shown him in advance what would happen and that he was with him all along.

It would be years – twelve to be precise – before I would get to see the bigger picture and more fully understand these two points and the arc in which I was living (see katabasis). I know none of this is random. I know there is symmetry, connections, timing, imagery, threads of motifs that tie it all together. I have experienced palpable foundations underpinning an arc, and a tapestry it took years to weave. Although I will know it more fully over time, the hand of Intention is unmistakable. An Artist is at work. What I am beginning to see is a masterpiece.

Can you see these threads, this part of the tapestry in front of you? Go ahead, touch it, it’s real.

* This is a reference to Jer. 16:6, a passage I had explored on Day 25. The passage is about searching which way to go, and having the confidence to walk in that way when it is revealed. The actual moment in the text when the path is revealed is left unspoken. Here I am referring to that gap as the moment of unveiling. This came to mind then, but I did not know exactly what to make of it. Only now do I have a better understanding, but that is perhaps for another edition.

**These are lyrics of a childhood Serbian hymn that came to mind in this moment. They speak of Jesus’ power over death through his resurrection.

(c) Belinda É. Samari. All rights reserved.