Three nuns were overheard talking. The first nun said, it is like this, “You wake to those you knew gathered round the foot of your bed. They reach out, pinching the tenderest part of your ankle, swinging you up, up, into the celestial space.”
The second nun tutted softly “No, sister, it is not like that, but as you go about your day, at the market or at a poem, you hear beautiful music coming in from the next room. Such beautiful music as you’ve never heard! And in the instant you have leapt through the door, it has closed behind you, and you remember that in your haste you have forgotten your body, slumped in the street like an old cloak.”
The third nun, shaking a head bound up in the Lord’s Own Linens corrected the first and the second with an authority of one who has schooled many in how the lord goes a-leaping: “You have it all wrong, dear sisters. There is a tunnel. There is a light. There is a scale and a feather. ”
The fourth nun, sitting a ways from the others, listened as their talk mingled with the Abbey bells and the cooing of the pigeons lighting from the Abbey’s great telescope. Untangling the thread, winding, winding, and keeping watch as she embroidered the galaxies across her canvas, waiting for the answer that laughed between the threads and their imperishable stars.
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