The Question

This has become a private tradition...Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year's Eve, I find myself down at the woods walking solo through the trees, reflective as always and dreaming awake. Yesterday was much the same. After the presents and the laughter and the children and the breakfast, I took one look around the wrapping strewn floor and the remnants of the morning and whispered now, shrugging into my new coat and making my way out there.

I spent two hours alone--noticing the damp cold scent of the old fallen leaves, running my fingers over the bark of my favorite trees standing sentinel along the trail, counting birds feeding on the stubble cut cornfields by the edges of the woods. I breathed deeply and moved slowly, pausing to look up at the sky laced with naked branches and to look down at the creek, littered with smooth mica-flecked stones.

I am looking to the new year with a quiet strength in my bones and an awareness that every single moment of the past year has been one I've needed to experience to deliver me back home...to my-SELF. Of course, yesterday, wandering through the woods I wasn't consciously thinking any of this I was just being empty and filled with outside. A gift of solitude to me, from me...forcing the question in my heart, "What else will you give to yourself in 2009?" It is one I am still waiting to answer, saturated with possibility and light.