God with me.

God with me on this pilgrimage is the kindest lover. He brings me gifts of beauty daily: flowers, a horizon of sea and sky almost painfully blue. I feel him hovering, wondering whether I like his carefully offered gifts.

I came looking for servanthood, for a way to be smaller, but keep running into the Lover of my Soul, making a space for me, more tender and hopeful than I could have imagined.

I have sat in meditation and devotion circles with the loveliest people, hearing their deep honesty, the kindness of their sharing. Their questions, their hopeful eyes. I have met the gentlest of souls.

I hiked through aspens and took shots of their trembling leaves. I’ve been transformed from a girl in the tropics to a girl in the woods, magically, overnight. I’ve carried the weight of my fears around with me, but they haven’t overwhelmed me.

In the high desert of Colorado, I marveled at a million good-smelling things. Sage for miles, piñon trees. I broke needles off and breathed them in. Rosemary in California, lavender. Have I ever noticed before, how good things smell in this country? Or the rocks, surprising in all their layers. I am not alone on my walk through the desert, there are rocks that hold me, deep and deep for miles, silently sharing the weight of a hundred thousand animal steps. I followed deer trails, was careful of cactuses. On a plateau, snow-covered mountains gleamed in the distance.

There are textures upon textures in the rocks. My friend Evan pointed out the layers of mountains to me, one behind the other in a long-eyed stretch of beauty. We drove in his old truck, named the Ox; the work truck with one semi-working door handle. My friends, devoted to simplicity, took me into their desert home and I ate Cheri’s homemade pasta with cheese from their goats. We listened to each other. I watched the way their peace with one another changed the air around them. A canyon wren came to sing in the house in the morning, cleverly perching on the sides of walls, as it would rock in its canyon home.

Driving under clouds that go as far as the horizon, hawks catching the updraft and calling to one another in the blue, mountains that change around every curve and cause me to sing out. I’m a Canadian girl who lives in Thailand and has an address in California, driving a rental car with Texas plates in Colorado. I’m floating in the updraft like those hawks, and I know this time that it is okay.  It’s okay to be a mother and not only a mother, a wife and not only a wife. To float a little, to be alone and not alone, under a large sky.