the presence of still water.

there is nothing i can say or do to predict or prepare what is to come. the stirring in my gut, and the spinning in my head will not stop with answers or rest. i must let myself go. i must choose to lay arms stretched across tender, leaf laden ground. if i inhale, i must exhale. i am alive today to live fully alive. tomorrow there might be pain. yesterdays remind me that it exists, but today the water is still. i am a man. there were no heroes in my pain. i was not anything special in the midst of hardship and tragedy. i was me. i am me. even though my wife has to remind me of who i am, and that one day did not make me this way, i am me. changed, but the same me. i am free.




“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” -Wendell Berry