ONE DAY, when I was in a time of need, the Fates reached out to me. They extended their hands in shape of a man who was further along in his journey then I was in mine.
The first time he sought me out he asked, in humility and curiosity, simply for us to break bread together. I did not give this initial encounter much thought; for at the time the changes that were destined to upturn my life had not yet been set in motion. I considered it as I would any other meeting – interesting and transient.
Nine months later I found myself grappling in a storm. Above, dark clouds stretched over an electric horizon. Below, the great waves of the unknown hurled me in one direction or another. Like a tree I would bend wherever the winds blew me, my roots standing strong, but my arms reaching out haphazardly in search for answers. I felt like an unmanned boat carried out into the infinite ocean: Truly lost.
It was then that he came to me for the second time.
We met on a morning in late spring. It had been a long and cold winter and finally the air was warming with the summer sun. We sat. He listened as I relayed my recent travails to him. He then stood and asked for us to walk. And he told me his story:
“Like you,” he said, “I found myself one day surrounded by darkness. I was beaten and battered, burned, bruised, and broken. For more than a year I had lost my way and like a man seeking shelter from the cruel desert sun I was parched of life. It was in this barren time that I was reborn a Phoenix.”
He did not mean this symbolically. He was a Phoenix – this he knew and believed to his very core – and during his time of great need he was purged of his old self, and he became reborn. In fire, flame, and searing pain, he rose from the ashes, reinvented and renewed.
“What you are experiencing right now,” he told me in celestial wisdom, “is your very own rebirth. You too are a Phoenix on the brink of rising from the ashes.”
I thought he was mad. I did not know then that the Fates had reached out to me. I did not know that they had brought upon me a prophet.
And one month later – in a blaze of fire and light – my resurrection began.
THE END
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