As I sat, Friday, barely breathing, thinking about my daughter and all my daughters and sisters and mother and our broken hearts, I looked down and I saw moss. Moss thrives on abandoned, barren rock. There is barely a crumb of nourishment yet it grows and thrives and transforms the grey, unforgiving rock with its living, thriving verdant green. It spreads its roots with abandon, gripping tenaciously as it transforms lifelessness into beauty. You find it clinging to downed trees or dead roots or cracked concrete or vacant lots. It stakes its claim on death and persists. The boulder we are faced with today is enormous. It is cold and dark and full of jagged edges and precipitous overhangs. That tiny voice inside me reminds me that we can be that moss, clinging on for dear life, persistent in its roots, verdant in its beauty. It tells me that we are the colonizers when life seems hopeless, when we are abandoned and left to rot. We too can transform death into life. We can recla
Holy Mother of the Tumbleweed of powerful wildebeest migration, of itchy feet, You see me as I ache to move yet resist You the same. You know my instincts, like You guide monarchs with your magnetic pull, and You urge the Ridley sea turtles to their nests on warm ocean currents. Understand my resistance to Your call-- when my fearful feet push against the mud making gaping tracks, when I choose to close up and protect myself from newness and change. Help me unfold myself to your call. Let me see the new horizon and the lessons written squarely on it. Allow me to settle my ego anxiety and trust the mystery of travel, of movement, of change, as purposeful, guiding lessons as I learn to choose fearlessness on Your safe, undulating, mysterious path.