Watched

Today's blog is purely for me with no regard to anyone who may be reading it. Readers beware.

I've always felt in a way that someone was always watching me. Even when I was young I remember feeling this way. As a young girl I remember playing outside wondering who could see me. As a teenager, I often imagined there was someone in my bedroom closet - witnessing my most difficult moments - seeing my tears of adolescence, looking over my shoulder as I would journal or wrote my poetry. Usually in those times it was a handsome young man - admiring my secret passions - waiting to comfort me and tell me that he saw and understood all the secret parts of my heart and thought they were wonderful.

At times, I've fancied my watcher to be God himself - watching his daughter and smiling - admiring her heart and her thoughts as they sought to run and fly beyond the confines of her human existence.

This feeling of being watched is especially strong when I'm alone. And sometimes I imagine I'm watching a movie of myself - watching me go through my day - and somehow the watcher knows all the thoughts and feelings that each look, each action portrays. And it is all larger than life - more important and significant than the laundry I am folding, deeper than the errands I am running.

When I walk in the woods, my watcher is always there. Sometimes I talk with him. It must look like insanity to anyone else. But to me, it is a sweetness.

Sometimes the feeling of being watched is so strong, that I look around nearly expecting to find someone there. Maybe this does make me insane, who knows. Or maybe everybody feels this way sometimes. It's not really something you'd bring up in conversation.

I really don't know where this even comes from. I don't know much about guardian angels - or if this is what is feels like to be in the presence of God all the time. Maybe it's some egotistical desire that I've fed since childhood that goes beyond narcissism. Maybe it's an over awareness of self that causes me to live too much of my life in my own mind. I honestly don't know what it is or where it comes from. But I know it's there.

Sometimes, I'll catch Doug just looking at me - or watching me. It is a great kindness to my heart. I see a brightness in his eyes and a smile at the corners of his mouth. It is like a balm of healing to my soul. And I'll ask him, "What are you doing?" and he'll say, "just looking at you." It is one of the best things in the whole world.

Maybe that's how our kids feel when we watch them - really watch them - and see them, and smile. Maybe I do need to think of God watching me all the time - and that he'll keep the things he created in me that no one ever sees - he'll see them and keep them in his heart for all eternity. Maybe it's the need to be celebrated as a life. Not because I'm wonderful, or great - or anything out of the ordinary. Just alive. Maybe it's the thought that feelings and thoughts and the depths of our hearts and minds are really too grand and huge and wonderful for this world - and that those are being seen and acknowledged as such. Maybe it's the wonder that God sees everything we don't. That there are insects deep in a jungle of some far off place just doing what they were created to do - and that makes God smile - that he celebrates even the most hidden of moments of thought and emotion as an extension bursting with the life that He knows himself to be. Maybe it's the sense that nothing is too small to be missed or overlooked - as if I could even see the cells on my arm creating new skin cells - a daily exchange that is truly amazing.

It's the thought that every rock in my driveway has a history - that each one was formed somewhere on this earth by various earthen materials that took thousands of years to form, and layer and mix. And that I can hold it in my hand, knowing there is not another like it on the planet.

Maybe I feel like I'm being watched, because I am always watching. People, nature, growth, change. It's all too wonder full. It is too good to miss. So maybe that's just it. Maybe it's just that I feel that life should be watched, observed, wondered at and celebrated. And if I feel that way - being small and sinful, I imagine God probably feels that way magnified beyond what I can imagine. He can see the cells forming within a mother's body. He can orchestrate gasses and unknown matter to come together and produce light in a new star that we can't even see. I greatly envy him that.

So maybe my being watched all the time thing isn't so bad. Although I find I can spend ridiculous amounts of time alone and really, it doesn't bother me at all. I'd probably make a pretty fair hermit. It's still kind of weird, I guess. But, then again, I've pretty much given up on the chance that I'm anything like normal - if there is such a thing.