Of Fluttering Eyes & Forecasts
a parable
The Fluttering Eye
My right eye started twitching last week, shortly after the new year began.
It doesn’t twitch all day long, just tugs and shivers every so often throughout the waking hours. I notice it most when I’m sitting at my computer, trying to get work done. Especially when I’m feeling distracted or scattered. Sometimes it’s predictable—after I rub my eye, for example, or sneeze—but most of the time it just seems to lie in wait until I forget about it, and then…it strikes. A tremble of tiny muscles, and then still.
This isn’t new, really. I’ve had this happen before. There’s no medical mystery to this; an eye twitch is pretty common in cases of stress or anxiety, as I think we’re all aware.
The body keeps the score, as they say, and my eye must know something I don’t. Perhaps I mourn not being able to see the future, to look forward with certainty at what this year will bring. Perhaps there’s a part of me that wishes the forecast was set in stone. At least then I would know.
Without going into detail, the last five years have been pretty tumultuous for me and my husband, as I’m sure they have been for many of you. Some good things, some less-than-stellar things, some pretty awful things. Ups and downs. The ups have been lovely, the downs have been dramatic. And every new year comes with a heavy question mark, a mystery: does “new” mean good? Or does “new” mean bad? Will the doorway to 2025 look the same as it does now, or will the landscape feel completely changed in twelve months?
If nothing else, I've definitely learned that a lot can happen in a year.
A Forum of Prophets
This annual uncertainty coincides this year with a typically tricky winter weather forecast over the next few days.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, the finer points of cold weather (and snow in particular) are really difficult to predict. The topography of western Washington is unique and strange, and certain formations can push or pull the pattern by a hair to create a whole rainbow of weather. Micro-climates, convergence zones…it’s like threading a needle. No one quite gets it perfectly right, even with the highest level of computer modeling available.
During these difficult forecasts, I like to sign in to a weather forum where a gaggle of meteorologists, both amateurs and former professionals, gather to look over the models, chatter and argue about the patterns, and apply their local knowledge to form a better picture. The old-timers are rarely wrong, because they know this region better than they know their own kitchens, their own backyards. They understand the push and pull, they’ve seen it all before, and they can smell a change in the air.
I never contribute, just sit and listen. It’s like magic to watch the prognostication transpire on the forum, and it’s a mystical experience to witness it unfold exactly as they prophesied outside my window.
But I’m sure they would be the first to say that there’s no magic involved. Not really. It’s just a mix of experience, instinct, study, and simple confidence in the testimony of the past. Not to mention a dash of puckish, good-humored guesswork.
Remembering
For five years, I’ve wandered an uncertain landscape, myself, marrying my love and moving across the water to this five acre parcel of woods and marsh and moss. Learning how to be a wife, how to be a daughter and sister and aunt at a distance, how to be a dog-owner and a land-steward and a home-maker and a neighbor and a friend and—most recently—a writer.
A writer, yes. A full-time creative. Taking an impossible chance on a lifelong dream that is still very much tentative, on a knife’s edge. Beautiful successes and growing community on Substack notwithstanding, bills still need to be paid and ourselves fed and cared for, our cars maintained and our house repaired. Money is tight. Expenses pile up. The hours of the day vanish. Reality is often cold and frigid to the creative life.
No forecast prepares you for it.
And so, I sit at my desk before a blank page, and my eye flutters. Uncertain. Tentative. Impossible. And I wish I had the answers. I wish I knew whether what’s coming around the mountainside was a storm or a sunbreak.
If I knew, I tell myself, then I could prepare.
But the prophets on the weather forum would be the first to tell me that it isn’t like that. You don’t steer by certainty, but by instinct and experience and study and a bit of puckish guesswork. Confidence in the testimony of the past, the shadowy roads already walked. You remember the way the Hand of God guided you every single time before, and you lean back into that. It’s the only way to navigate the mystery without losing your mind. With a kick and a smirk and a shrug and a, “Well, God alone knows for sure. I can only tell you what I remember from last time.”
You keep telling yourself your own story, over and over, until you remember.
My right eye is twitching. But that’s okay. Soon enough, my body will remember how this journey feels, this travel through the landscape of an uncertain new year. Soon enough the memories and stories of the past will sink into my bones, marrow-deep, to inform the present.
Soon enough, as I go forward, I’ll see my way clear.
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S.E., the bravery of this personal sharing gives the rest of us relief that we all are basically on the same pathway, just at different points of learning to navigate. Your experience is there to illuminate the path for your fellow travelers, just as you are (as we all are) taking the same where you need it I think.
Uncertainty is the fertilizer of faith. It's not a poetic picture, but the metaphor is apt. Natural fertilizer is unpleasant to apply to the earth (it's stinky!) and it's hard to imagine eating the food that grows out of that soil. And then, Spring. Tiny green shoots emerge, offering a glimpse of what will come. They grow and in due time, mature to nourish our bodies. Uncertainty is much the same. It's hard to imagine what may grow out of a dormant season, but hope emerges as a tiny glimpse. It matures into confidence and in due time, we live the reality of God's goodness.