The Pink Sky Kid

Until some young age, I, Laura Renee Bedford, Midwest kid with frizzy blonde hair, experienced the sky as pink. I do not know exactly how old I was when the sky changed color, but I remember trying desperately to understand what had happened, and I remember staring into the sky waiting for it to change back from blue to pink. When I asked my dad about this turn of events, and then inquired with others, it was obvious that no one else had been seeing a pink sky. This was somewhat unsettling. “What else weren’t they seeing properly,” I wondered, as only a child can wonder.

About twenty-two linear years after the sky incident, while living at a yoga center based around the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, another resident and I were preparing dinner, talking about “God.” My friend echoed the words of a long-departed teacher, “This is the most dead we ever get.” In that moment, the world dissolved. A palpation of liberation passed through my body. I exhaled enormously and unconsciously, an instinctive, volcanically cleansing release. Upon hearing those eight simple words--that I would come to realize later freak out most people--I was stunned to my core with recognition. It was as if I had been waiting for this confirmation for a very long time, and I celebrated with a grin.

For my whole life, an inner smile has come easy to me. Yet, just as easily, between gleeful bouts, have come intensely soulful pleadings for God to come and get me. Right now.

God hasn’t come to get me. Not in the way I expected anyway. And now I know why. This is my story of learning how to remember it was I who chose to forget God, but not really. I have always been at home and simply dreaming.

It is an honest tale. I don’t say it’s true, only because only the Truth is true, and I don’t remember, at least entirely, what Truth is, but I do know this much. I know the Truth is Perfect Love.