In the Hush of a Sunrise

What I love more than the colors themselves, is the quiet and assuming way they present themselves. Without chatter or clamor, not an echo is spoken to draw the slightest bit of attention. You either are awake for the experience or you are not.

The presence and gifts are available everyday—without condition.

I thought of Vincent Van Gogh this morning. I didn't know him, yet I have a sense that when he painted, his brushstrokes were also an outward quiet expression of creation. His paintings not presented with the condition that someone must love them. They were created with the same universal beauty of a colorful sunrise. They had to come out. Channeled as a hushed expression of all that is right and true.

I have the same experience many times with my writing. The words spilling out, doing their best through me, to paint in phrases of sunrise. Quietly resting on a page to be read and taken in fully—or not.

Once in a while I will go back and read something I have written. More times than not I think, "Who wrote that?"

Just like in the hush of a sunrise, God did.

The aWAKEning

Grief, like a boat motoring at sea, leaves behind in its path a wake. Similarly, in the wake of loss, grief doesn't travel a straight line to recovery. It carves through the range of emotions—from the deep waters at our bow, bruising past our once-even keel, and churning out the turmoil of rocky waters aft. And in those early moments of disbelief and despair, everything you thought you knew—has been lost at sea.

As the wake fans out behind the boat, with time and distance, so follow our emotions. Softening the turbulent churn, smoothing out the sharp ripples and waves of feelings. Not that we ever forget. However, as the saying goes "time heals all wounds."

How long and how far must we go to restore equilibrium? That's anyone's guess, as we are all individual in our processes of recovery and our life journey.

As the wake lessens—the life lessons begin to appear, like a clear horizon after the storm. In my own navigation with loss, I have found this to be profoundly true. This is the year of my—aWAKEning.