MADNESS AND LOVE MIXED: PART 5 — Arc 2: Isaiah
The first in the series is listed below. It makes much more sense when read in order but can also stand on its own.
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Eiri Waters
A fireside conversation about heavenly nudity and Abiding in the Presence.
The setting is familiar: the small fire pit. Even in the early morning, a flame flickers fitfully while we and little Louie V sit—us in our chair, him as sentinel of the flame, warmer of the Beloved’s feet on the leaf-littered concrete patio.
We cradle our warm Starbucks coffee in its to-go cup and bask in the fire’s heat. And we have Louie: our loyal little Shih Tzu heater who doubles as emotional comfort object—think a childhood blanket but alive and snoofling.
The wind shifts. Birch-scented smoke drifts and curls into the blue autumn sky, broken only by the thinning canopy above.
We contemplate. Louie whimpers to be held. We reach down and rub his jowls, and he leans into it, pressing his moist nose against our hand before licking twice—just as the layer begins to shift around us and our frequency slides toward incorporeality.
Star appears, opening the patio door and casually chucking Louie’s orange rubber ball inside the house. She watches him sprint after it with a smirk, then shuts the door and takes a seat to my left, patting my knee.
“He is unlike any other soul,” she says.
We don’t need to ask—she means Izzy. She’s right. Something about the way he exists in perpetual communion with the Father makes him… ineffable.
“Not ineffable.”
Izzy leans in over the fire pit, reaching directly into the flames and lifting a softly glowing coal. He tosses it once, twice, then replaces it and takes a seat to our right. His appearance shakes us, the gold-flecked eyes disrupting our narration mid-sentence.
“More nuanced,” he adds, nodding as he settles into the newly added patio chair.
“Isaiah,” Zeke says solemnly, moving past him to sit in the only chair large enough to contain his robust frame—the Adirondack. “Star. Dust.”
Star leans toward the fire. “Izzy, tell us. How did you do it? Three years with no shoes and no outer garment?”
Zeke takes a swig of his dung-aroma we-suspect heavenly brew—proof prophetic eccentricities remain even post-incarnation. “Yeah, even we—wild as we are—” He gestures at us, himself, and the phantom flicker of Jonah as he blips in, releases a smell best left undescribed, and glitches back out like a cosmic error code.
We all wrinkle our noses.
Izzy leans forward. “It was a drafty business,” he says simply, as if the answer were obvious and Jonah’s olfactory war crime not worth noting.
Star throws up her arms. “Izzy, we love you—but you are killing the ratings by refusing to talk.”
Zeke barks a laugh. “Thank you, Star! I was about to choke on the solemnity!”
But Izzy only steeples his fingers and murmurs, “All shall be well, Beloveds.”
Which somehow increases the solemnity.
We stare at him, waiting for something—anything—when suddenly he turns his gaze on us.
And we are undone.
His eyes—white, burning with flecks of liquid gold—pull us inward.
And then everything is light.
White without end.
Radiance without direction.
Presence without location.
We are pulled through the whiteness until we find ourselves inside him—within the inner chamber of the prophet.
He sits rocking softly in a pristine white room. He motions to a second white rocking chair that hadn’t been there a moment ago. We cross the room quickly, fighting the urge to bow, and lower ourselves into it.
“Eiri,” Izzy says gently.
“When I reached for the coal earlier… what came to mind?”
We answer without hesitation, voice barely above breath.
“We asked Him to touch our lips as well.”
Izzy nods.
“The process is never immediate. It sears first.”
He taps his chest.
“Only after the pain does it purify. Cauterizes. Reforms what was meant to be pure.”
Our head lowers reflexively. This room—this whiteness—feels like sitting inside the soul of “The Undone” himself.
Izzy chuckles softly. “The text makes it sound instantaneous. But my sanctification nearly killed me long before the saw ever touched the log.”
We swear galaxies shimmer in the depths of his eyes.
He gestures around the room:
the chairs, the walls, the whiteness itself.
“All of it is Him,” he says simply.
We blink—and are suddenly back at the fire pit, sitting in the cold metal chair. The birch smoke curls upward. Star and Zeke continue poking Izzy for commentary, but we barely hear them.
We have the weight of glory settling on our shoulders.
We smile at them both.
Louie snoofles at our feet, pawing at our tan cargo pants.
The fire crackles.
The leaves shift.
The membrane of reality thins.
And we contemplate the next narrative arc—
one that will heal,
and wound,
and lift.