Bring Me To The Desert

It's cold and wet here now, the beginnings of winter. I look out Griffin's window at the grays, blues, and small flashes of reds and yellows from the changing leaves, and distantly acknowledge they are reflections of the shades of my heart, echoing the colors of my many emotions. I feel how the salt water chills the cold, making it invincible against any attempt at warmth.

Grief is a long, strange, and a tangled rope of hope and despair and every emotion in between. I go from a peace that surpasses all understanding, grasping at it with every ounce of strength I have when I feel it start to slip away again, to feeling numb with heartache and loss. I was not made for this - to swim in these tulmutous waters of emotion that constantly turn and change and transform, taking my all-too-fragile peace with every tide and storm into something dark and foreboding, feeding the chaos that already lives in me, constant and loosely held at bay.

I find myself longing, more and more, for the constants and supreme patience of the desert. To sit in the unforgiving sun and feel it heat my skin until it warms my soul too. To absorb the vast expanse of silence until the chaos in my head and heart can no longer be heard. To stare at the unassuming and crisp flowers that remind me lovely things can still grow in uninhabitable places. To follow the lone bird, gliding on invisible currents, so I can remember the possibility to soar on unseen but stronger things than I know. To meander amongst cactus and ancient trees, knowing even sharp and deprived creations are still living (even thriving) against all odds. To burry my hands and feet in the sand as I remember this was once hard and unmovable stone. I want to dwell in the patient and unhurried pace of an expanse that has not seen change in thousands of years - that seemed content to evolve slowly over millennia, as if it knew what was coming was worth the long wait. As if it knew that losing its former beauty and familiar, even after being stripped, weathered, and worn down a multitude of times, would all be worth it.

Most people don't ask for the desert, I know. But after the past 2 1/2 years of living in one, both metaphorical and physical, I see the beauty here now - I see the why. I do not believe it was punishment and misery God intended every time He placed one of his children here. It was so they could find the unassuming beauty, fierce hope, and healing you can only find in this place. I understand that kind of hard but ultimate love now. I understand that gift.