Pain too much to handle also comes with exquisite beauty, as common as dirt, as unexpected as grace.
There was healing in the tyranny, and tyranny in the healing.
I wondered what those mountains behind them might tell me, what advice they would give, if they could talk. What they would tell me about love, and about loss, and about how this wild place could heal as naturally as it could kill.
There is no greater intimacy than sitting with someone traversing that tenuous boundary between worlds, sitting vigil with a spirit trembling on the border, reaching toward the new and releasing the old.
The line between the living and the dead may not be much of a line at all, but the terrain is not for the weak of heart.
Honoring a life is honoring the wide open space of wilderness and unknowing where the sacred dwells.
Resurrection does not come without crucifixion, and you cannot celebrate Easter without living Good Friday.
What is known might sometimes sustain us, but what is unknown will save us.
Grief would weave itself among the threads of love and life and hope, and I was starting to believe that what came of it all would still one day be beautiful.
Tracks were adumbrations of the energy of life all about us, the recent history book of wilderness.