HUG Corner: Thought for the Week 7/2/18

Healing After Loss (Martha Whitmore Hickman)

I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day – the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.

– Terry Tempest Williams

Which of us has not felt his or her heart soar at the sight of birds flying across the sky? What a lift it gives us – their freedom, the formations they make as they turn and dip and then wheel off to some far place. They are a good way to symbolize the swirling currents of our life, the mysteries of beginnings and endings. 

I remember visiting a friend’s farm soon after my daughter’s death. This friend had a swing hung from a tree limb. I got on the swing and pushed and pumped and, at the top of the arc, wondered what it would be like if I could just let go and fly up into the sky. I think it was one of my first occasions of hope – that I could make it through, that brighter days were coming.

In a world of such beauty as birds in flight, surely I can come to feel at home again, even after my loss. And if, in thought, I attach myself to birds in flight, who knows where that may take me?