The Keepers of Heaven
Keepers of Heaven
On a magical blue stone, medieval scribes, and the invisible current of Heaven on Earth
Published: March 10, 2024
10 MINUTE READ
They say if you’re falling from space, you should relax.
That if you tighten your muscles to brace for the fall, you’re more likely to injure yourself, but if you soften, your body will behave more like jello, become like a tree in the wind, be less likely to snap.
I reminded myself of this as the flight attendant held the intercom to her mouth and told us to “buckle up, it’s gonna be rough.”
An hour earlier, after my scheduled flight was canceled, I was handed a boarding pass to this new flight. I noticed my row right away — 18, my lucky number — but now I realized I was sitting in the very last row of a sure-to-be-rough flight.
The man across the aisle caught my eye and whispered: “They’re kind of making this sound scary.” I nodded in agreement and pulled my buckle tight. My husband slipped a sleep mask over his eyes, Wake me when it’s over.
I took a deep breath, felt more panic than I’d ever felt before a flight. Fifty-six minutes. Just fifty-six minutes. The pilot kept saying, “56 minutes, wheels up, wheels down.” I just have to survive the next fifty-six minutes, I told myself as I decided: I’ll just meditate.
I closed my eyes and focused on my breath, allowed my mind to reach for the invisible layers of reality, the spaces full of spirits and heavenly beings that despite my puny human eyes, I’d had the pleasure of seeing over the years. I felt them flock around me. I saw one get right up in my face and tell me, This is not how you die. Don’t worry. Relax. Let Heaven move through you.
As if this is the reason why it’s important to stay soft — not for injury prevention, but because this is the only way the current of Heaven can find its way. I saw in my mind how tightening my muscles restricted the flow of this heavenly force, and so, I relaxed each and every one of them as I breathed. Slowly. Deeply. Air flowing like the ethereal current itself.
The engine whirred in the turbines behind me. The wheels accelerated along the runway, and up up we went.
My mind expanded beyond the narrow radius of my body. It spread itself throughout the cabin, and with eyes still closed, I was struck by the image of shadowy figures hovering around the other passengers, clinging to the metal sides of the plane. No, no, that will not do, I thought. Then I shoved them away with the power of my breath.
I imagined space clearing around every person so their loved ones could stand beside them, so Heaven could flow to them just as I felt it was flowing to me, and in my mind’s eye, I imagined the plane was being carried by bodies of light, that we were being directed towards a bright light of safety, and I use the word “imagine” here (rather than “see”) because the border between mystical vision and human imagination has always been thin. It’s made even thinner by desire and fear. And I was a frightened, longing thing. I didn’t totally trust I wasn’t making the whole thing up.
But I didn’t care. I breathed. I let my body be soft. I kept my hands resting in my lap, and then, and I heard the words in my mind —Were they whispered? Were they imagined? Where did they come from? I don’t know, but they echoed inside me like a mantra. I spoke them silently to myself:
I carry heaven inside me, and there is grace in everything.
I carry heaven inside me, and there is grace in everything.
I carry heaven inside me, and there is grace in everything.
I’m not sure how many minutes passed. Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Occasionally, the plane shook, and my feet clenched my shoes, my hamstrings tightened in my seat. Be soft, be soft. I got so good at softening that eventually I stopped tightening all together. But mostly I was amazed that the ride wasn’t really that rough. Or at least, I didn’t perceive it to be. And every time the plane started to shake, I reminded myself that the empty space between my body and the earth is just an illusion. It’s actually full of gases and invisible particles, and in my mind, they were shining like starlight. And the plane was made of starlight and every passenger was made of starlight and all the shakes and sensations were just stars meeting stars, and then, the shaking would stop, and I kept chanting: I carry heaven inside me, and there is grace in everything.
I chanted and chanted until the words evolved and soon I was saying:
We carry heaven inside us, and there is grace in everything.
We carry heaven inside us, and there is grace in everything.
We carry heaven inside us, and there is grace in everything.
And there, with eyes closed, God knows how many minutes into my hour- long meditation, I saw streams of light flowing through every person on the plane. I saw Heaven reaching in and out of all of us. I saw how this was possible, and I wished for it to happen — for everyone to allow Heaven to move through them with ease, for we carry Heaven inside us, and there is grace in everything.
And the wheels hit the pavement, and I opened my eyes, and I was in New York City.
☆
“[There is] a realm within New York City, a current that runs along its streets…a force field charged by synchronicity and overlap, perhaps invisible but inarguably there.”
— Luc Sante, introducing Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy
aka, the words I read before boarding the plane
☆
Do you know the answer? My husband asked, pointing to a crossword clue on his phone: “lapis lazuli shade.”
Blue, I told him, before completing the answer in my head — with golden specks.
It’s blue and gold. It’s blue and gold.
He filled in the puzzle: AZURE.
And I looked up from my orange subway seat, saw the advertisement facing me. It was blue and gold too. Like the lapis and the lilies. The lilies —
Earlier that day, I walked up the marble stairs of the New York City Bar Association (attorneys, not whisky). I curved down a windowless hall before opening the door to a restroom, and that’s where I found them — the lilies.
They weren’t placed between the sinks or pushed in the corner like some decorative display. Rather, they seemed to have just been left behind by accident, were propped at the edge of the counter atop a marble tray that surely someone meant to carry back with them but then forgot.
I approached the vase and smiled at the flowers because they weren’t just lilies. They were calla lilies, the specific variety I saw blooming inside me six months ago, back when I felt I was pregnant with destiny.
The lily I’d seen was white. I’d only ever seen white calla lilies before, but these…these were blue and gold. Blue and gold.
I counted them later from the picture on my phone. I figured there must have been two dozen of them, some nice round number typically ordered from a florist, but instead, there were thirty-eight. One for each year of my life.
And that’s what I was remembering when the train came to a halt and suddenly, I was swept into a stream of blue and gold:
I turned to get off the train and found myself facing yet another advertisement, completely unrelated to the first. It was also blue and gold. And I stepped into a station I’ve surely seen before, but it felt like I was seeing it for the first time, and the walls were covered in dark blue tiles — blue on blue on blue except where, in places, blue met gold, and then the wall became gold on gold on gold, framing a mosaic portrait of a dog.
And in that moment, I remembered the hexagonal storm at Saturn’s north pole — how sometimes it’s blue and sometimes it’s gold — and I flashed to a dream I once had where I was choking on a stone. I spat it out my mouth and it tumbled to the floor and it was a piece of lapis lazuli.
Blue and gold.
Blue and gold.
The next morning, I researched the stone and learned it’s been found in the ancient remains of women’s teeth.
Scientists believe it’s a clue that 1,000 years ago, women were serving as artists and scribes. They dipped their brushes in blue ink colored by the stone and used it to create brilliant illuminated manuscripts. In the process, they licked the tips of their brushes to create a fine point, thus depositing bits of the stone in their teeth.
For centuries, women weren’t thought to be the creators of these glorious texts. Authorship was ascribed to monks, not nuns, but the discovery of the stone inside a woman’s fossilized mouth provided evidence that in the middle ages, women were writing, creating, and actively involved in the keeping of heaven’s stories.
These days, you can buy a piece of lapis lazuli from Amazon for six dollars. Back then, it was more expensive than gold. It was used only in the finest inks and was reserved for the most skilled artisans.
In Latin, lapis means “stone,” and lazuli comes from the Arabic word for “heaven” or “sky.” With its blue like the sky and gold like the sun, this particular stone was considered “a stone from the sky” and thus named “the stone of heaven.”
However, I knew nothing of this when on September 10, 2022, I dreamt of a stone falling from the sky and landing in a lake near my house. The stone felt potent, powerful, and in my dream, it was named the Stone of Heaven.
Back then, I researched the words — “stone of heaven” — and stumbled upon many references to jade in China and the black stone in Mecca, but nowhere, not once, did lapis lazuli appear. Not until five months later, when I dreamt I spat lapis from my mouth and it came tumbling out of me, did I learn that lapis lazuli means “stone of heaven.”
But I’d forgotten all about this when six and a half months after that, on September 8, 2023, I found myself sitting on the beach by the lake from my dream. At the time, I was completely unaware that it’d been almost exactly one year since the dream — no, the stone — arrived. And I couldn’t remember the last time I’d visited the lake, but all summer long, I’d been receiving emails about a regular yoga class happening there. It always sounded lovely, and I never went. But time was running out! Fall was coming! This was the last class of the season! So, I bundled my mat and drove to the lake, and it was there — at the end of class, in my mind’s eye — that I saw the stone again. It leapt from the water and skipped into my hands and I scooped it up and swallowed it.
And now, I carry heaven inside me, and there is, I think, grace in everything.
☆
☆
☆
My husband enters the room where I’m writing, and I hear the sound of cardboard ripping. I got my first new record in a while!
He excitedly walks over to show me, and my eyes land on the sticker on the cover. It’s blue and gold, blue and gold.
I pull the album close and realize it’s by an artist I’ve never heard of. I flip it over to see what it’s called. The title is scrawled across the center in big white letters: I GOT HEAVEN.
And I burst out laughing and think, I do! I do! I got heaven!
And you’ve got heaven!
And we’ve all got heaven!
We carry it inside us — THE KEEPERS OF HEAVEN.
And there is grace in everything.
And I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.
