#hiddenness — Public Fediverse posts

Mornings of Obscurity

I awake from a strange night of vigilance to a day filled with the white trappings of fog.

Within me, however, there is clarity.

Often the outer landscape informs the inner, though they are not always alike. The meteorology of the soul follows different laws. A clear morning may find me lost within myself, while a world hidden beneath fog may awaken in me some unexpected certainty.

Still, there is always a lesson to be learned, if I can stay aware enough to be educated.

There is a kind of safety in what is hidden.

Fog softens the distances. It removes the horizon. It asks nothing of me beyond the next few steps. Things ordinarily exposed become mercifully indistinct. Roads disappear into the pale. Houses, trees, the fauna of everyday, become shadows.

I need such mornings.

Perhaps there are times when obscurity is not confusion but a refuge, when I am protected from seeing everything at once.

I think of the bathroom mirror after a shower.

I emerge from the steam and reach for the towel, and there I am—or ought to be—but the reflection is incomplete. I am there somewhere beneath the white film. I can make out a shape, a suggestion of myself, but not the familiar arrangement by which I reassure myself that I am still who I was before I stepped beneath the spray.

For a moment I am only a blurred presence.

There is mercy in that too.

I spend so much of my life asking the world to return an image of myself: Who am I here? How do I appear? What has become of me? Yet sometimes the glass clouds over and will not answer.

I can wipe it clean with my hand or a towel, of course.

But then there is only a small clearing in the mist—a smeared oval through which one eye looks back at me while the rest of me remains unseen.

A partial revelation.

Enough to know that I am there.

Yet not enough to see the whole.

And there are other moments of obscurity.

I step from the bitter cold of winter into a warm building, and my glasses immediately cloud over. Or I leave an air-conditioned room and enter the heavy heat of summer. The lenses upon which I depend for clarity suddenly become the very instruments of my blindness.

I have crossed a threshold too quickly.

For several seconds the world disappears.

I know it has not vanished. I know there is a floor beneath me, furniture nearby, perhaps another person approaching. But knowledge and sight are not always the same thing.

So I stop.

Or slow.

Or remove the glasses and wait.

There is something almost sacred about that small helplessness.

The instrument meant to help me see must temporarily be surrendered before sight can return.

Perhaps there are thresholds of the spirit like this.

I cross from grief into joy, certainty into doubt, solitude into community, one season of life into another, and discover that the ways I have learned to see no longer work immediately on the other side.

My lenses fog.

My familiar interpretations become opaque.

For a moment I am blinded not because there is nothing to see, but because I have entered another atmosphere.

And perhaps wisdom is learning not to panic in that interval.

The landscape remains.

The self remains.

The world remains.

I simply cannot see it clearly yet.

But one cannot remain forever in obscurity.

The sun will rise.

The fog will burn away.

The steam will leave the mirror.

The lenses will clear.

And what has always been there will slowly be revealed—not created by the light, only uncovered by it.

The hills were there.

The road was there.

The distant trees were there.

The face in the mirror was there.

The room beyond the clouded lenses was there.

What frightened me was there.

What called to me was there.

Perhaps this is the discipline of such mornings: to receive the hidden without mistaking it for absence, and to receive revelation without imagining that revelation has suddenly made the world new.

To understand that obscurity is sometimes a condition of crossing.

That there are moments when not seeing is not the same as being lost.

That clarity may exist within me even while everything around me is veiled.

And that sometimes the wisest thing I can do is stand for a moment at the threshold, blinded by my own lenses, trusting the world is still there.

Sometimes clarity arrives before the landscape clears.

Sometimes I must learn to walk while the world is still blurred around me.