I will always have this place

I am reminded once again that I am on a journey with You. I am not stopped because of present world events – the threat of world war, divisions within humanity, or unsustainable debt and the slow leaking into poverty – any number of other things that could make the heart heavy if I turn my eyes away from You.

My thoughts return to the cave seen a year ago – the one I walk through with You to a vista both old and new at the same time, a reminder of Your eternal presence without boundary. This is connected to the cave art I have been currently studying, where shamans of old drew pictures of what they had seen of the spiritual world, within their world 35,000 years ago.

Men have been on a spiritual journey for thousands of years, and the cave seems a metaphor to me of entering a special place with You, being led to somewhere my heart has yearned to go, but never knew where until I came through the other side of the cave. It has been such a journey, and I feel close to arriving somewhere else to explore.

The Hollow Mountain by borda on DeviantArt

It is always the heart’s expectation to be somewhere it is not, to feel what it has longed for from the unknown, to experience possibilities of expression from what it has never felt. It is such a journey with us.

This is not Me taking you somewhere that I know, but together going somewhere we have not known. I would reveal all of the kingdom to you, but we would experience it together. It is new for both of us.

The cave is to give you a visual of our journey together, a transition of moments, where memories are accumulated by both, to be cherished forever. They are not to be forgotten, nor the journey left in the past as if we were only interested in where we are going; no, we hold fast to all the moments of time; all are eternal.

There have been many caves within your life, all meaningful, all incredibly personal. I would lead you from what you hold tight in your heart to a place where the heart is free to be all that it is – a place of affection, of promise, of the true reality of a walk within Creation as it should be seen and known.

In its greatest purpose, your heart is the cave – where I draw upon its walls of remembrance, where I have visited, where I have found the personal connection I have always sought, to be with the one I have cared for since your creation. It is where I would dwell eternally, where I would experience that which is unknown to Me, where I would remember the moments of our journey together. I will always have this place even as we explore other realms of creation – for it will always be the place of yearning for My heart.

I would love to see that place, the personal place of God – Your cave with all the memories of me, the thoughts of You towards me, the drawings upon the walls of Your observations of my life. Perhaps it’s not so much about going somewhere heavenward, though that would be an amazing journey, but knowing the inward heart of God – Your eternal, inner place. For within that place I will see the infinite heavenly places – it is the cave of light.

∞

No. 020 THE WALLS REMEMBER

THE WISDOM

The world right now can make your heart heavy.

War. Division. Debt bleeding quietly into poverty.

The slow erosion of things that were supposed to hold.

You know the weight.

You might have carried it this week.

Your work might feel small against the noise of what humanity is doing now.

But some people — in the middle of all of it — are still moving.

The heart is a cave. And what that means for everyone still walking.🧵

/1

35,000 years ago, in the depth of the earth, men painted what they had seen.

Not just the sky. Not just the hunt. Not just the village.

But the inner world.

Shamans pressing pigment into stone.

Trying to say:

I went somewhere.

I came back changed.

This was real.

We have never stopped doing this.

/2

∞

A cave is a portal.

Dark at the entrance.

Unknown at the depth.

No view of the exit from where you begin.

Every major transition in your life has felt like this.

The ones who froze never found the vista.

The ones who kept moving found something

they could not have been told.

/3

∞

Here is what most people get wrong about the deepest kind of seeking:

They think it's them following Someone that already knows the way.

But the greatest journeys aren't like that.

Two presences entering unknown territory together.

Neither certain of the outcome.

Both shaped by what they find.

The best partnerships in business, craft, and love —

they all have this quality.

Not instruction.

But discovery.

/4

∞

The instinct in turbulence is always to discard the past. Cut the losses. Abandon what was. Move forward.

But the oldest wisdom — pressed into cave walls before language existed — says something different: every moment is worth keeping.

The shamans drew what they saw so someone who came later would know the territory.

Nothing real is wasted.

/5

∞

I have been living with something for a long time:

The presence I thought was leading me somewhere He already knew — isn't.

"This is not Me taking you somewhere I know. It is somewhere we have not known. Together."

There is no understanding for this. But once you hear it, you recognize it everywhere.

The most durable things ever built were built exactly this way.

/6

∞

Here is the thing about the cave:

It isn't just a passage.

It's where the seen is remembered.

Every encounter that cost you something.

Every moment you couldn't explain to anyone.

Every time you felt, briefly, that you were somewhere true.

Still there.

On the walls.

The oldest One in the universe

has been visiting those walls.

Not to judge them.

To remember them.

7/7

THE PRACTICE

Every tight passage you have walked through has opened.

Not because you forced it.

Because Someone in the passage was already moving toward you.

He already knows what you cannot see from where you're standing.

He is not waiting at the destination.

He is in the passage that leads to it.

"It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; He will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed."

— Deuteronomy 31.8

Before you sleep, place your hand on your heart for one breath.

This is the cave.

Every journey you have made lives inside it.

Every arrival.

Every passage that narrowed before it opened.

The walls remember what you have forgotten you lived.

There is One that has always sought this place -

and seeks it still.

He has not tired of the walls.

He has not forgotten a single thing drawn on them.

"For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."

— 1 Samuel 16.7b

The Walls Remember

I will tell you of a man named Ethan who drove to the end of a road he had not planned to take.

He was a photographer of old things - not old in the way of antiques or architecture, but old in the way of civilizations lost and recovered, of marks made by hands that no longer lived, of stories told without language on stone that outlasted every king and every empire. He had made his career in this peculiar work, and it had been, for a time, enough.

But the year had been heavy.

He did not need to tell you why. You have had such years yourself. The news was dark each morning and darker each night. The markets moved like a frightened animal. Wars gathered at borders the way clouds gather before a storm that does not break, but does not pass.

Men who had built things were watching them bend under weights they had not anticipated.

His own work - his quiet documentation of what humanity had left behind - felt small against the noise of what humanity was doing now.

He had almost canceled the assignment.

It was a small commission: two weeks in the Dordogne valley in southern France, photographing the caves near Les Eyzies for an academic publication that perhaps three thousand people would read. Not the famous caves. Not Lascaux. The smaller ones. The lesser known. The ones the tourists did not fill with their voices and their heat.

But something in him - a thing he could not name - said: Go.

And so he drove to the end of that road, and he parked beside a farmhouse that looked as if it had stood for three hundred years without apology, and he knocked on the door.

The man who answered was old.

Not frail - old in the way of certain trees that have survived both drought and flood and carry a particular quiet authority because of what they have endured, not despite it. His name was Marcel. He had been leading people into these caves since before Ethan was born. He had guided archaeologists and schoolchildren and heads of state into the dark, and he greeted all of them the same way: with a nod, an offer of coffee, and very few words.

They sat at a wooden table and Marcel poured the coffee and said nothing for what felt like a long time.

Then he said: "You look like a man who has been carrying something."

Ethan said that the world was heavy at the moment.

Marcel nodded, as if this were not new information. "It has always been heavy," he said.

"That is not what I mean."

Ethan did not know how to answer that. So he said nothing.

Marcel stood and took his jacket from a hook by the door. "Come," he said. "The cave will not wait forever."

The entrance was not what Ethan had expected.

He had photographed caves before - wide mouths in cliff faces, impressive and theatrical, the kind that invited the eye and announced themselves. This one was a seam. A narrowing in the earth, barely wide enough for a man with a pack, descending at an angle that required you to turn sideways and trust that there was room enough ahead to breathe.

"Smaller than you imagined," Marcel said. It was not a question.

"Yes," Ethan said.

"They always are," the old man said, and went in first.

Ethan followed.

For several minutes there was only the sound of their breathing and the pale cone of the headlamp and the cold pressing in from stone on every side. Ethan was not afraid. He had been in caves before. But he felt, in this narrowing, a particular kind of humility - the kind that comes not from being made small but from suddenly understanding how large the world is that lies outside the small circle of what you have seen and known.

Then the passage opened.

Not all at once. The way a river widens - gradually, then completely.

He stood in a chamber thirty feet wide and Marcel swept his lamp along the walls... and Ethan did not speak.

He did not speak because there was nothing to say.

They were there on the stone - the animals, the hands, the marks. Not painted with the hesitation of someone learning, but with the confidence of someone who had seen and needed to record the seeing. A bison turning its head. Horses in procession. A human hand pressed in ochre. The lines of someone thirty-five thousand years gone.

Someone who had stood in this room and needed to say: I was here. I saw something. It was real.

Marcel let him stand there for a long time.

Then he said: "Do you know what they thought they were doing?"

Ethan said he had read the scholarship. Shamanic ritual. Records of hunting territory. Early cosmology.

Marcel shook his head slowly. "The scholars think. I have been here forty years. I have a different thought."

Ethan waited.

"I think they were drawing the inside," Marcel said. "Not the outside. They had seen something - in ceremony, in dream, in a place between places - and they came here to record it. Because the cave was the only place that felt right for it." He paused. "It already knew how to hold the dark."

Ethan looked at the bison. At the hands.

"Have you ever been somewhere," Marcel said, "that you knew you were meant to be, but you could not have found it on a map?"

Ethan thought about this for a long time before answering.

"Once," he said. "Maybe twice."

Marcel nodded as if twice was exactly the right number. "The heart is like that," he said. "It knows territory that has no map."

They came twice more over the following days.

Marcel spoke little. He was not a man who believed that wisdom was best delivered in speeches. He pointed. He waited. He said a thing and let the cave say the rest.

On the second visit, he said: "People think a guide knows where he is going."

They were deep in the chamber, and Ethan was lying on his back photographing the ceiling.

"Don't you?" Ethan asked.

"I know the path," Marcel said. "I do not know what you will see. Every person sees something I have not. After forty years, I am still surprised." He paused. "This is why I keep coming."

Ethan lowered his camera.

"You mean you still discover things here?"

"I mean," Marcel said carefully, "that what happens in this room - between a person and these walls - I have never seen it before. It happens once. It does not repeat." He looked at the paintings. "I am not taking you somewhere I know. I am going somewhere I have not been. With you."

Ethan lay in the dark for a long time after that, looking at the mark of a hand pressed to stone thirty-five thousand years before the birth of the city where he lived. Thirty-five thousand years of men and women walking into the dark and drawing what they had seen.

He thought about the year. About the heaviness. About the news that pressed in each morning and did not relent.

He thought about how none of that had touched this room.

Not because this room was escape. But because this room was prior. It was older than the noise. It had been here before every empire that rose and fell in the long interval between that painted hand and his own, and it would be here after the ones rising and falling now. The marks on the wall were not diminished by what was happening outside.

They were the record of what survived it.

On the last morning, Marcel walked him to his car.

They shook hands, and Ethan thanked him in the way you thank someone when words are insufficient but you offer them anyway.

Marcel held his hand a moment longer than expected and said: "You have been carrying the weight of what is outside. But you have something inside that the outside cannot reach."

Ethan said: "How would you know that?"

Marcel smiled. It was the first full smile Ethan had seen from him in two weeks.

"Because you came," he said. "You almost didn't. But you came."

He let go of Ethan's hand and walked back toward the farmhouse and did not look back.

Ethan drove for two hours before he stopped at a café on the side of a road that ran beside a river he did not know the name of. He ordered coffee and sat with his notebook open and did not write anything for a long time.

He thought about the chamber. About the hands on the walls.

He thought about what Marcel had said - I am going somewhere I have not been. With you.

He had spent his career documenting what was old. He had never considered that the making of it was new. That the painter of that bison, that hand pressed in ochre - they were not recording something finished. They were in the act of discovering what they had seen, only as they drew it.

The cave was not an archive.

It was a conversation.

He opened his notebook and wrote:

The heart keeps everything. Nothing is lost. Not the good years and not the heavy ones. Not the work that mattered and not the work that failed. It is all still there — on the walls. And something has been visiting those walls for longer than I have known.

I thought I was behind. I thought the world was closing.

I was only in the narrow part.

That is how caves work.