Vachon Imagined

When something is brought into the light, it does not always arrive peacefully. Sometimes it arrives with the force of a storm.

Take childbirth, for example. There are few things more natural than giving birth, and few things that can appear more violent. Bodies convulse. Pain surges. Voices rise. Life presses its way into the world through blood, effort, and surrender.

I remember the woman in the room next to mine. She wanted the entire floor—perhaps the entire hospital—to know she was having a baby, and she was doing it without medication. As we say in the South, bless her heart. Different choices, same life expressing itself.

The point is that life is not always quiet when it emerges.

Standing in the light is often the same way. We imagine awareness as a peaceful realization, a gentle moment of understanding. Sometimes it is. But other times it is a memory returning with such force that you can no longer contain it. A feeling rises from somewhere deep within and suddenly your entire body knows before your mind does.

The energy comes rushing through. It may appear as anger, grief, fear, agitation, or rage. What is happening is not that life has suddenly become violent. What is happening is that something long hidden has entered consciousness.

Life can arrive violently. It can arrive silently. But it always arrives.

This is why appearances can be deceptive. Just because something emerges with intensity does not mean intensity is its permanent nature. A wave is not the ocean. A contraction is not the child. A moment of rage is not the entirety of a person.

The more familiar we become with our own inner life, the less frightened we are by its energy. We learn that anger is not always destruction. Grief is not weakness. Fear is not failure. They are movements within us, expressions of life seeking awareness.

Over time, what once triggered us becomes recognizable. What once overwhelmed us becomes understandable. We have stood in the light long enough to know these movements as our own.

And once you truly know them as your own, why would you reject them?

Why would you refuse what has always belonged to you?

To know yourself is not to become free of your humanity. It is to become intimate with it. To stand in the light long enough that even the parts of yourself that arrive screaming are met not with fear, but with recognition.

And perhaps, eventually, with love.