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Not all those who wander are lost. ~J.R.R. Tolkien

Six hugs, three yoga classes, and one gathering with other seekers of a sort alongside red bricks and plastic iced coffee cups, and silken seconds later found me riding my bike under tall April tree branches and a white cloud hovering sky, tires hugging the soft smooth pavement below while 4pm Tuesday silence both echoed out around the contours of me weightless-yet still moving-and equally held me close. Grateful for the existing ability to be in and with process while so many of the cars driving past me seemed so focused out.

So I rode home, groceries on my back, and Mary Oliver’s “dark hug of time” line from her poem “the spirit likes to dress up” echoing around the observational edges of my mind. Things pleasurable, safe, full. Then fridge full, and I stood in admiration of my own good parenting, feeling the desire to continue riding the wave of that feeling to the river, sit and write into, harness, christen those crystalline moments, stepping back into solitude after a day so far spent mostly with others.

And so it came up unexpected, the interruption of this contentedness, a momentary lapse of being caught mid-air by the knee dropping and humblingly penitent pleading place where solitude seems to intersect with loneliness and a memory of loss.

Eye-sky-searching at this sense of fallen-ness that seems to be a cellular memory of the things we’ve lost-the times we’ve been open and present and full of all our magic that an unexpected and equally magical being reflected back to us. How confusion and groundlessness can so quickly live on the other side of assuredness and competence when we remember the sound of their footsteps having fallen away.

Maybe it was the approaching full moon.

Juxtaposing the completion we feel in having done such a good job in taking care of ourselves so far today.

And so in these moments, standing there while fleeting wisps of perfume from a wilting bunch of yellow spray roses move through the apartment air, eternity can feel like a frustrated questioning timelessness around how we’ll hold this consternation forever. At least until we re-synergize our mosaic hearts, redirect & hone the butterflies once rising up from our belly in excited anticipation that are now awkwardly hovering mid-ribs in confused stagnation. Until our mothering pieces catch back up with us and say: Who am I to have such impatience for my own humanity?

Surrender becoming a blessed benediction.

When our bodies all of a sudden feel tired, the journey unexpectedly becoming long, we have to linger inside the not knowing while the words leap up from our chest, wondering if landing them onto the page inside thin blue vertical horizontal lines will make us feel held.

Still I wondered if it was entirely the missing of someone else, or if parts of me were anticipating my rushing ahead to do something else, worrying about me missing the chance to re-connect with the threads of myself fully alive in these very moments.