A Reverent Wonder

There are seasons when the outer world mirrors the inner one so precisely that its hard to distinguish the outer atmosphere from my inner world. 

Winter has settled around me today, heavy snow, muted light, a hush that feels sacred and almost requires the sacrament of snuggling in with soft music, a book, a cup of warm chai, and fuzzy winter socks.
Inside, I feel a matching quiet, a hush, a heaviness that isn’t sorrow, but something more intricate… the bittersweet ache of letting go. 

I used to think transitions were all mind, willpower, and a series of well planned decisions and logistics.
But the body knows…

My body knew today.
It grew tired and demanded a stillness as if it remembered every chapter I’ve lived inside these walls of my beloved apartment, the friends who became family, the lover whose presence shaped my days, the mountains and trees that held me through nearly a decade of my life. A decade of learning me. 

We can’t box those things.
We can only bless them and hold them in our hearts.

And yet, even as the boxes fill and the rooms empty one by one, something inside me expands.
A quiet relief.
A new beginning forming at the edges of my awareness, like the cool blue of dawn before the warmth of the sunrise.

I’m excited about the move west. I’m excited about returning home.
I feel it in my chest like the first breath after a long-held exhale.
But this excitement has its own kind of sadness.
A bittersweetness that carries its own grief, the kind of melancholy that’s settles when a heart felt chapter finally closes with intention and care.

I am leaving a life I built with determination, hard work, care, and spiritual guidance. 

I am walking out of a decade marked by resilience, community, love, and loss.

I am stepping towards a place where I don’t yet know a single soul. A new community, a new beginning and a new sunrise. 

Today, my body, still tender from treatment and loss, still learning to navigate with its new limits, asks me to move slowly, to honor the season of hush and snow.
To honor the shedding.
To honor the accumulated ache of a year that required everything from me.

I don’t feel broken or overwhelmed.
Just human.
Just someone standing in the quiet season of letting go, packing my belongings in the soft light of winter while the future waits patiently at the door.

There is a strange courage in this softness.
A familiar, quiet bravery that doesn’t roar… she whispers.

A knowing that endings are not failures, they are thresholds.

And so I step over this threshold into the unknown…
not with certainty, but with a tenderness and a quiet wish.

While the snow falls outside my window.
I sit, letting my heart feel both the ache and the unfolding.
Letting my body continue to set the pace.

Letting the tides of my mind ebb and flow in the mystical rhythm of my dreams…an arrival, like the crest of the sea, felt first in my heart, then on my lips as they curve into a smile, and finally in my eyes as they close in remembrance of a future memory.

I can feel, and then see myself opening the door to my new apartment, a space I will tend as lovingly as I tended my west side shanty… greeting a new part of myself, and the future friendships and love waiting just beyond that threshold, with a quiet knowing and reverent wonder.