What is consciousness? Am I in it? Is it in me?
Everything is vague, dim. My senses seem shrouded, distant, blocked.
Something or Someone calls my name. So far away. The sound of my name slowly builds, growing stronger, clearer. It seems to cut through whatever is shrouding my mind until it is crystal clear, sharp with a reality that pierces through anything unreal.
My awareness grows, gets clearer.
I’m laying on something hard, unyielding.
I can’t move.
I’m covered in something sticky. It clings to my flesh, wrapping me in … something meant for the dead, surely. I can feel each limb wound round and round with slightly yielding cloth, but mushy, filled with I know not what. My torso, too.
Why am I so wrapped? Covered, bound, surrounded so closely with material that binds and restricts and contains and constrains.
A desire for freedom, for movement, stirs within me. As the ringing of my name continues to grow, the longing for life and freedom grows within until it becomes a yearning.
Have I felt this before? Have I known the freedom my whole being now craves?
The Voice, if it is a Voice that called my name, changes.
Faintly I hear what might be, “Come forth.”
So faint.
It starts to build, to grow as the sound approaches where I still lay shrouded, entombed, trapped within these wrappings.
I try to move, to reach for what my whole being craves.
A twitch! I managed a twitch! I moved!
I try again. Slowly my limbs move. My toes wiggle, then my fingers. My legs flex. My arms. So slowly I raise my torso. Oh, so heavy!
I strain as if lifting the weight of the world.
Bit by bit I slide one leg to the right. It slips off an edge of what I must be lying on. The slip pulls my other leg after it and my torso follows. I roll onto another hard surface. But whatever enfolds me, shrouds me from any pain of the fall. One arm had moved to try to break my fall, automatic – and helpful – response.
The command to “come forth” is still ringing, building through this place – cave? Room? Tomb? It stirs me, giving me strength somehow to sit up, to twist a leg under me, to begin to rise.
My bindings, still sticky, begin to flex, allow greater movement.
Finally I am standing.
Still shrouded but upright.
The call draws me to the left. I shuffle toward it … after it?
My awkward movements get smoother. My limbs and whole body move more easily.
Now I see a light in front of me. Still dim. Vague. My eyes are still covered. I reach up a hand and slowly, as if I have never done it before, grip and pull away whatever is blocking my site.
Aaahh!
I see.
A tunnel. A passageway. An opening there, at the end.
Freedom.
I walk, now, toward it.
I am answering the call to come forth.
To what I know not, but only that it will be better than being so shrouded, so entombed that I could have – would have – stayed there forever.
No. I will be unshrouded!
Someone waits there in the opening.
He says my name again. Softer now. With love and compassion. And again, “Come forth.” No longer a command but a gentle invitation.
“Unwrap her,” He says. And someone moves to unshroud me, unwrapping the things that have bound me, loosening the graveclothes until I stand there clean, free. Alive once again. Or maybe for the first time.
Yes. I will live unshrouded now.
What is it that has shrouded me so long?
