1/2/12

A gift from God

While being terrified of giving birth I asked other veteran moms how I could prepare for it and cope with my fear.

I heard some very good advice, such as believing it is a mental game, like finishing a race. If you think you can't do it, it will be a lot harder to accomplish, so go with the mind set that you can.

I can related to that. As a figure skater, when I approached the idea of landing a difficult jump, it became a lot more effortless when I believed I could.

Amist all the advices I got, however, a friend said I should ask God for guidance.

God! I complete forgot about that.

I am not a religious person and I don't go to church. Growing up in private catholic schools will do that. I am, however, in touch with that something else, whatever that is, and I believe that he, or she or it is here, everywhere and inside of me. I had plenty of proofs and don't need organized religion to teach me that.

The plains of heaven

As a little girl I had this recurring dream that I arrived in a field where women in white waited for me. Sometimes a tall figure, a male figure, more like a beam of light, would join us. There was always the most striking classical music playing; music I had never heard before.

When I woke up, I would hum the songs for a few hours as to not forget them, but eventually I would and this is the reason why I went to music school. I didn't so much wanted to write music, but wanted to put on paper the ones I heard on those dreams.

Sometimes I would fly over this field and at the end of it there was a beach, or a lake.

The women in white never let me look at them straight in the eye. They would tell me I wouldn't be able to handle it. One day I insisted they let me, and this one woman was so beautiful that it scared me and I woke up crying. I don't remember her face. I just remember it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Those dreams were so vivid and I loved going to that place so much that when I got back from school I would go into a dark room and just visualize I was in that field while listening to classical music.

My grandmother used to say I was an old soul. My cousins just thought I was weird. Maybe I am a little bit of both.

Fast forward to 2010 and my period has arrived yet again.

I am sitting in my car, crying, already late to meet with a client, parked in front of her office.

Because I don't pray that often, all I could say to an invisible God was, "Where is my baby? Where IS my baby?"

I wiped my tears and went to meet my client, a Jewish woman married to a Muslim. Both taught me a lot of other ways to look at God. She and I shared a passion for photography and paintings.

This day, as she greeted me by the door, she handed me a painting by John Martin and asked whether I wanted it. Immediately, upon seeing the image of a field, a lake and women dancing in white, I said, "Oh, I've been there!"

The cliend cocked her head and looked at me as if I had three eyes. She said, "Dear, I don't think this place exists."

I flipped the image and read the title: The Plains of Heaven.

That's when it downed on me that I hadn't in fact been to that place, but I recognized it from my childhood fantasies.

Maybe I had seen such image when I was a little girl and that's where my dreams came from coupled with my grandmother's habit of listening to classical music. A romantic part of me, however, chooses to believe on the other possibility.

I took the painting with me and kept looking at it as I drove.

I noticed then, while parked in a red light, that right in the middle of the image, surrounded by the women in white, there were babies.

The babies were there, in the plains of heaven, playing.

It's no surprise then, that while looking for the meaning of the name Matthew, a name I picked randomly, I found it to be, "a gift from God."

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