PERMISSION
Is the permission we wait for someone else’s to give?
____________________
I awoke with this understanding that something important was missing. Although I wasn’t awake at all.
It was Mama, gone but so present I felt I had gotten something wrong.
Still, there was this impossibly real call to Daddy.
And this is where the story becomes even more complicated:
Daddy had also departed eleven years ago.
She was at the Lexus dealer, her voice soundless as air though I could hear her as if she were beside my bed. She was doing her best to convince Daddy with her passive way of wearing him down.
Endless questions—
of features and extended warranties,
things that I never imagined existed in Heaven.
Because they don’t.
He stood his ground.
I knew my mama would get her Lexus. I knew it would be white.
A sedan because she was classic like her 58 canary yellow T-Bird she drove in real life.
In the end she opted for the convertible, sporty and sassy like her.
I willed myself to keep my eyes closed under waffled blanket, wrapped in her Heavenly essence carried on rays of first-dawn light.
A morning like this doesn’t come easy when sleepy eyes open to a world absent of Jacqueline. Things longed for yet otherworldly in the enchantment they bring.
I marvel at what had moved her to bring this gift of winged titanium and steel to me.
I could feel her hair tossed and windswept in that convertible, like my own a hundred times before. With a little boy wrapped in baseball-stitched white leather while John Mayer welcomed us to the Real World, blasting through the ether on his guitar.
I found and lost myself in my sassy convertible Lexus in midnight rides along the interstate, once clothed in nothing but moonlight.
Something in me shifts as I remember how wild and free I was back then—
I had forgotten her.
Not the car.
The woman.
The one who didn't need anyone to tell her she was allowed to feel the wind in her hair.
Today, my white jeep will become the Lexus she called to ask permission for.
Even from the free-est place in the Universe, she still felt she had to ask—
I wonder, did the asking come from me…or her?
Why do we allow our deepest longings to belong to someone else?
Do we ask to seek clarity?
Or do we abdicate responsibility in case what we want is not something we should have?
It’s fifty degrees and not at all the kind of weather that beckons t-shirts and tops down.
But today I will drive with roof panels absent and heater on.
Along the twisting tree-lined road,
past ragged fences and tumbled-down barn,
until I hear the words, “Pull over.”
And I will know just whose voice it is.
The woman who rationed her “yes you mays” like cans of beans in famine came all the way from Heaven to tell me Abundance has no end.
When I discover that I still want it, whose permission will I wait for?
In the softest hour of the morning when your mind and body are eager to get up,
Let your spirit over-ride and keep your eyes tightly shut.
Allow the other world to speak, the one that visits in the night,
Cradled in this in-between moment arrives the truest of insights.
Maybe the dispatch is the memory of that wild moment,
riding bare under moonlight.
No one to notice or admonish.
Only me being me.
And maybe the gift of that moment wasn’t meant [only] for then.
But now.
Perhaps the woman driving down the interstate under moonlight knew something the woman waking beneath waffled blanket needs now.
Today, I am driving with abandon, toward her.
No.
Toward Him.
Because Mama isn't the authority granting permission.
She's the beautiful messenger.
NOTES
SOUL MAP
dream → Mama → Daddy → ask → permission → wanting → moonlight → wild → abundance → freedom → HIM → HERE
Sometimes the thing we have tucked away makes itself known.
And then comes another question:
What will we do with it now that we have found it?
We can release what binds us.
Speak life over what remains.
Imagine what all that life is for.
And still—
wait for permission to live it.
Permission is complicated.
Sometimes asking is wisdom. Consideration. Love.
And sometimes we ask because we would rather someone else carry the weight of our wanting.
A yes absolves us.
A no protects us.
Either way, we don't have to stand completely inside the desire and say:
This is what I want.
Even from the free-est place in the Universe, Mama was still asking.
Maybe that was the revelation:
Freedom can be ours before we know how to inhabit it.
REFLECTION
What, precisely, are you asking permission for now?
Is it permission to spend?
To want?
To be extravagant?
To choose something simply because it delights you?
To change your mind?
To take up room?
TO HEAL?
Or perhaps the harder question:
Are you asking for clarity—or asking someone else to take responsibility for what you want?
And beneath even that:
Whose “yes” are you still waiting for?
A parent?
A spouse?
Your children?
Your circumstances?
YOUR BODY?
The version of you who once believed wanting less made losing easier?
God?
And if it is God—
are you waiting for permission He has already given?
Maybe abundance isn't having everything we want.
Maybe it is no longer living as though desire itself must be rationed…like canned beans in famine. Oh, Jacqueline, how much you missed.
DROP YOUR PINS
what I want → whose permission? → what I fear → what I know → what I choose → freedom → HERE
Or perhaps yours begins somewhere else.
_____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → _____ → HERE
YOU ARE HERE.
Image: Then, this was just a woman looking out from an open Jeep. Now, we know something she doesn't yet know in the photograph:
One day she's going to take the roof off again.