At times, when I am low, down and dark, I sit with my feelings and thoughts, then I cast them out in words, not so much as a net but as a kind of beam, however narrow and dim. As I write I think to myself, perhaps I can touch someone else who might be feeling similarly for their own reasons: someone with an ill child, a struggling marriage, a thankless job, a broken body, an empty pocketbook, a lost soul. And I find that when I share my innermost feelings—these dark embers—my readers ... they restore me. Their words and the energy of a moment come back to me in spades. One such reader gave me this:
Christy Brave. Christy Fierce. I trust your every word because you ask 'why me?' I offer them to the Lady of the Lake and I share them with my adult community college students who feel you and need to hear that it's ok, even good, to ask 'why me?' That there is no answer to that question, but there is the asking, and in the asking you have souls reaching for yours with love and understanding. And your words heal whole lives. And those lives can now hear 'why me?' In the voices and even the silences of others and they reach, they reach too. You, Calvin, you are healers. Your words and lives have touched many. I have seen it. You have been the cure. And I deeply believe that the cure for you, for Calvin, is in the hands of someone who has already been given the gift of your hands, of Calvin's. I believe there is a cure and I share your words and lives as far as I can reach trusting that some day they will reach the hands of the cure that will reach back to you and to Calvin, in deep gratitude for the great healing love of your lives.
And though I am not necessarily brave, but perhaps fierce, within her words indeed I find a cure, a cure for my down and dark, a cure for my hopelessness, like the glow that shimmers off the face of dark waters. If only it could be so for Calvin. But I hold out hope that perhaps my reader, this wonderful, loving lady of the lake, speaks the truth.
Christy Brave. Christy Fierce. I trust your every word because you ask 'why me?' I offer them to the Lady of the Lake and I share them with my adult community college students who feel you and need to hear that it's ok, even good, to ask 'why me?' That there is no answer to that question, but there is the asking, and in the asking you have souls reaching for yours with love and understanding. And your words heal whole lives. And those lives can now hear 'why me?' In the voices and even the silences of others and they reach, they reach too. You, Calvin, you are healers. Your words and lives have touched many. I have seen it. You have been the cure. And I deeply believe that the cure for you, for Calvin, is in the hands of someone who has already been given the gift of your hands, of Calvin's. I believe there is a cure and I share your words and lives as far as I can reach trusting that some day they will reach the hands of the cure that will reach back to you and to Calvin, in deep gratitude for the great healing love of your lives.
And though I am not necessarily brave, but perhaps fierce, within her words indeed I find a cure, a cure for my down and dark, a cure for my hopelessness, like the glow that shimmers off the face of dark waters. If only it could be so for Calvin. But I hold out hope that perhaps my reader, this wonderful, loving lady of the lake, speaks the truth.
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| photo by Michael Kolster |
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