When leaving work at half past five today, to a still bright sky, I found myself unexpectedly feeling something close to euphoria. What?! While it's not a totally unfamiliar state it's not where I usually hang out.
But it is March.
Reading photographer Sally Mann's auto-biography recently I learned eidetic*. Brilliant word.
*relating to or denoting mental images having unusual vividness and detail, as if actually visible.
50 weeks ago I had the eidetic thing, and it happened on a March afternoon much like today. My frame of reference to understand it extended to just two things.
1. As a teen listening to the very elderly lady next door, Mrs Lloyd, as she recounted to me in her dark kitchen her experience of having once been face to face with Jesus. In telling me she was ecstatically re-living it once again. I snuck away, sweaty, after what seemed like hours but what was probably 20 minutes, out into the summer sunshine.
2. As a chld Jeanne d'Arc experienced visions of angels and saints in her garden at Domremy.
Mrs Lloyd and Joan of Arc... me. Maybe everybody, sometime? Supranatural encounters.
For me, it wasn't meeting Jesus or the Archangel Michael or Saints Margaret and Catherine, just someone stood waiting for me after work. Smiling.
Mrs Lloyd had passed away peacefully a few years later and Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431, aged 'about 19'. I'll go for A, please, if I have a choice.
