NOVEMBER 28
The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the
dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped me in their
peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the
wonder: that I exist.
—DAG HAMMARSKJÖLDMaybe in the wake of great sorrow, sensitized as we are to
the shadings and symbolisms of experience, to the mysteries
at the edges of life, we are more able than at other times to
feel a kind of unifying pulse with all that is.
I remember, in the aftermath of a great sorrow, standing
on a mountaintop veranda on a clear summer night and
feeling as though there was an almost palpable connection
between me and the stars above the opposite mountain peak
that shone in the night sky.
This tenderness toward creation is a gift dearly bought,
and perhaps it’s a kind of expanded consciousness evoked
by our reaching out into the universe for what we have lost:
Where are you? Do you read me? Do you see me standing here,
thinking of you? I love you. I know you know that.
On and on it can go, this fantasy conversation with the
dead. And yet, in the unity of life, who knows who is
speaking and who is listening?
I will be still in my soul, and think of my love.