Today, I find myself holding a quiet kind of melancholy...a soft ache that lives in the spaces between breaths...a quiet grief with an ember of hope lighting my way. The trees are still doing their sacred work—offering oxygen without asking for thanks.
The rivers keep moving forward, even after everything they’ve been forced to hold.
The soil still remembers how to grow things back, even after being trampled....oh, how I feel this in my soul.
There is something profoundly humbling about that kind of patience.
And yet, I feel it today—the weight of what is being lost, what is being burned, what is being forgotten in the rush of human life.
I feel the weight of life today....and I am holding it close to my heart.
Creation has held us close in its arms when we have needed to feel the presence of God...when we have needed to be held.
With all the chaos going on in the world (and some personal things), I seek out holy ground to place my feet on.
To ground me.
To remind me that God gives me peace in the middle of my greatest storms.
I anchor myself in that truth and mindset.
And I also remember...
A leaf doesn’t rush its becoming.
A cloud does not apologize for changing shape.
The wind does not argue with where it is needed—it simply goes.
Nature does not demand perfection. It just keeps returning to balance in its own way, over and over again.
And somehow, that becomes a kind of medicine.
Like the leaf, I will not rush what I am becoming.
Like the clouds, I am changing shape and embracing a new life.
And like the wind, I find myself going in yet another direction, as I trust it is where I am meant to be.
Today I am letting myself be held.
To be held by sky.
By quiet ground beneath my feet.
By the sound of birds nestled in tree branches.
I am not trying to fix my melancholy, or my sadness or my grief—I am letting it belong to my Creator...God's Earth.
Because maybe healing is not separate from grief.
Maybe it is what happens when grief is finally allowed to sit in the sunlight.
So I will walk a little slower today.
I will touch something living.
I will breathe a little deeper than I did yesterday.
And I will remember...
...the Earth has never stopped trying to love us back, for it is an extension of God's love, peace and tranquility.
And I love that.
Much Love,
Linnea
Photo: I took this picture on one of my nature walks - Pringle Creek, Salem, Oregon...my oasis.
