Vachon Imagined

Within the temple, she is hidden from the world.

She floats through a place of living dimensions where everything is caring, nurturing, and free. Here, she is wholly herself. Her dreams belong. Her nature is unquestioned.

She is surrounded by pleasure, by alignment.

There is no striving here.

No comparison.

No becoming.

She simply is.

But one day, the girl—now a woman—decides to venture into the cold and often damning heat of human experience.

For the first time, confusion emerges.

Without realizing it, she mistakes confusion for herself.

“This is who I am,” she thinks, as yesterday’s voices and tomorrow’s fears fill her mind.

“I know,” she thinks. “I’ll pursue something.”

A man.

A relationship.

A friendship.

A career.

A goal.

That will fix my confusion.

And so she steps further into the world of experience.

But with every step toward becoming someone, she moves farther from simply being.

She loses touch with the temple.

She loses touch with ease.

Every so often, when life refuses her plans—the man leaves, the goal fails, the relationship ends, people disappoint her, people fail to live up to the expectations she placed upon them—she returns to the temple doors and weeps.

Her body remembers what her mind has forgotten.

It mourns the time when she lived as pleasure itself.

For what was once untarnished has become tarnished.

What was once whole has become fragmented.

She wonders why the world cannot give her what the temple once gave her.

But she does not yet understand.

The world was never meant to be the temple.

People were never meant to carry the weight of her salvation.

The man was never meant to heal her emptiness.

The achievement was never meant to quiet her longing.

She had left the temple searching for herself, not realizing the temple was never outside of her.

And in leaving, she entered separation.

This was her sin.

Not because she was evil.

Not because she was unworthy.

But because she had forgotten.

She had forgotten her belonging.

She had forgotten her alignment.

She had forgotten the presence that had always given her life.

She traded communion for control.

Surrender for striving.

Being for becoming.

And so she returned again and again to the doors.

She pounded against them.

She cried out.

She gathered others to help her open what could not be forced.

But the temple does not yield to force.

Its doors open only to the humbled.

Only to the surrendered.

The crowd grew angry.

They shouted louder.

Pound harder.

Try harder.

Fight harder.

Divide more.

Separate more.

Control more.

Become more.

Yet every attempt to force the doors open created another wall between them and what they sought.

Every battle created another battlefield.

Eventually, they left her alone.

And she wept.

Even her grief had become controlled.

Measured.

Managed.

So she gathered herself again.

She raged.

She screamed.

She fought.

Until exhaustion finally arrived.

And after years of searching, there was nothing left.

No crowd.

No promises.

No distractions.

Only herself.

Only silence.

Only everything her body had carried.

And from somewhere deeper than thought, she whispered:

“Not my will, but Yours, O God.

I am here.

I am Yours.”

And the doors opened.

No hand pushed them.

No strength earned them.

No goodness purchased them.

The doors had never been locked.

Only she had been.

She had spent a lifetime believing she had wandered away from God, only to discover she had wandered into the endless rooms of her own mind.

The temple had never asked her to become someone else.

It had only waited for her to stop becoming.

Atonement.

At-one-ment.

Not payment.

Not punishment.

Not proving.

The ending of division.

The place where the river remembers it was never separate from the ocean.

Where the wave remembers it has always been water.

Where the child searching the world finally discovers she has been carrying home within her all along.

Nothing new was given.

Nothing missing was returned.

Only the illusion of separation fell away.

She did not become one with God.

She remembered she had never been two.

The temple had never judged her wandering.

It had never closed its doors.

It had simply waited.

Because the temple was never a place she returned to.

It was the place from which she had never truly left.