aroma of angel

I am up all night just like a year ago today. Then, the waking was guarding a beloved body, brainstorming a burial, packing out of a hospital room that held all the prayers, all the vigilance and all the heartbreak. Up all night like so many of the twenty-five nights before that night, when the staying woke was a relief in it's silent-ish respite in the ICU after a day of bustle, when it was whispered zikr and solo slow dance swaying toward sunrise, when it was nestling into stiff chairs that became portals that became beds that became watchtowers that became anchors of love. Up all night like in years before that, when overstimulation that led to no sleep meant raucous wee hours conversation about the days' events with this One who is now fiercely, tenderly married to God.

I can blame tonight's no sleep on prayer past my bedtime or I can embrace it as yet another invitation to find that One in each breath. I keep turning toward him only to discover there is nowhere to turn. He is Right Here and I have dizzied myself for absolutely no reason other than my humanity, my forgetting, my falsely distinguishing the air I breathe from the love that is the sea of him.

There is enough perfume still wafting from his pre-wedding presence to quench the desire of ages. The edge is in opening olfaction to catch his palpable scent now - wild, sweet and more richly resonant than any note that has before been sung.

My cells - which I once prayed might train themselves to detect his fragrance from beyond - are delighted to override distraction and to bathe in the everywhere isness of this copal cardamom aroma of angel, ascended master, beloved friend. It is the scent of being surrounded by and saturated with yessing, with blessing, and with cascading Magnificence. It is an experience that the particular expression of embodied divinity which is you, and which is me, is entirely needed, intrinsically enough, and unequivocally known.