This is How You Heal

Arriving (M.A. Reilly, Over the Atlantic Years Ago)

I.

In the year after his death, broken from its moorings, my body no longer felt like mine.  Adrift, I felt legless. Yes, I lifted an arm to take down the tea cup. I pressed an arm against the doorway. I moved in the world with a mindlessness that kept the separate, broken parts of me together.  The limbs I once knew for 56 years propelled me into the world where I least wanted to go and where I was most desperate to escape to.

Sorrow weighs and now I see it is more anchor than burden.

II.

Three years have passed and sorrow lifts like the first rays of morning sunlight across the sea. I am home in this body again, different than I was before. But aren't we all moving to stay whole?  Isn't that the impetus in life?

Here's a truth to hold close in those early days when you most want to distance yourself from the pain of loss. Sorrow does lift and you lift it with the grace of something you could not know before.

#SOL16: Seeking Happiness

from my art journal, 8.26.16: gesso, acrylic paint, watercolor, pan pastels, ink.

I.

It's late afternoon when Jim comes up the walkway from the beach. I watch as he opens the screen door and steps into the porch where I have been writing. He puts down the few things he has been carrying and eases himself into the Adirondack chair next to mine. Before this week, I had only heard a story or two about Jim, but I had never met him. He's a frank man, a contemporary--one it is easy to take a liking to.

We're quiet for a bit as Jim settles in chatting about nothing in particular when he asks,

Know what happiness is? 

Family? Friends? Good health? I offer. 

After a pause, Jim says, Well, they're all important. He waits a bit before continuing. Happiness is contentment with little.

Neither of us say anything. Before Jim repeats, Contentment with little. 

Love that definition, I say aloud. 

And Jim laughs a bit before saying, I saw that on the corner of a bulletin board in a trucking office one afternoon. I haven't forgotten it.

II.

I left paints and my art journals at home last week when Devon and I headed to the beach.  Last night I picked up one of my journals and began playing with the idea of happiness scattering sorrows--a quote that has been in my head since Jim shared the definition of happiness.

Sometimes to paint badly is to know contentment.
Little there too is often more.