The lights have gone out in the cafe.

The wind gusts the leaves outside, orange and yellow fluttering in tufts, and the November light shines through the windows. My shadow on the wall outlines me dimly. I see it on the cream-colored paint beneath stains from coffee splatters and gray scratches where furniture was scraped.

Justin was gone for a few days last week, and I was lonely. It made me think of Berta, my former neighbor, 86 years old, who used to live next door. And Meg, our neighbor on the other side of our house, who also lived alone. After having a houseful of kids—and a dog—collectively requiring my energy and attention for two decades, I thought the quiet would be welcome. But it was strange. I wonder if I like quiet better when I choose it rather than when it happens to me. 

The maple tree in our backyard was blazing red last week, its brilliant leaves hanging like delicate, tired flames.

Now, as they fall, the garden floor bears a circle of red. It is gorgeous, though uncomfortable to witness, the bright dying of beauty to make even more.

Love is like that—hanging on and letting go, dedicating oneself to believing there is good coming, even if something has to die first for beauty to be born again.

I don’t know what to say to her. What are the magic words to a person’s heart?

My story is not hers–we each carry different burdens and wounds. But yet, in our pain, we are somewhat the same, aren’t we?

Isn’t pain pain? Isn’t sorrow sorrow? Isn’t fear fear? Or does one person’s burden weigh more than another’s? And, if so, does this make them more or less able to carry it? 

Sometimes, there just aren’t words. It is not that life isn’t happening, that there isn’t meaning in the day-to-day.

It is that a part of us needs to quiet. 

There is no big problem to solve, no hard pain to treat. 

We are in a space with all possibility and hope, yet claiming this space feels distant somehow. 

Unless we slow. 

Will you let my quiet fill you? Will you let my tenderness pull you under?

For the last month, when his back legs got wobbly, and he started to lose weight–and when he got too weak to climb the stairs–I carried him up and down, his lanky body leveraged awkwardly against my left hip, his breath heavy and hot in my ear. Every night at bedtime, he nuzzled his nose into my arm before curling up on the floor. Then, in the morning, he’d lie splayed out near Justin on the other side of the bed. We have become experts at maneuvering over his warm, furry body in the darkest rooms. We walk carefully, always just assuming he is there. 

I sit on my bed, thinking about light and how I can describe hope in words.

Another gift, how morning comes. The house still, birds chirping outside, swooping to drink and dunk their beaks in the water bowl. September air in northern California—crisp, with a hint of cold on my skin when I push out the windows.

The sun's light blankets one tree branch in the backyard, the other in shade from a taller tree’s branches overhead. Sunlight and shadow. Undulations of light in stillness. The light moves, and the earth rotates.

What if I wrote you a letter–in this place of here and not here? 

I might begin by saying that the house is quiet. No cars are on the road. It is dark outside my window and within this room. All lights are off, and I listen with all my senses. 

My ears are just one way to hear, after all. 

As a child, with my bedroom window facing the almond orchards, I listened early to the mourning doves’ calls. They perched on the creaking windmill a quarter mile from our house. What do I hear now, forty years later? I know my heart beats, but I don’t hear it–just the click of fingers on the keyboard, though I can block out that noise from my hearing, too.

I don’t know what to hold onto.

Long ago, in grad school, a friend shared how taking risks and setting out on any adventure where you don’t see the outcome is like being out on a trapeze, swinging through the air, with no net beneath you. She described the feeling of the air against her face as she let go–and her body, tethered to nothing, stretching out to be caught by hands stronger than her own. 

I am stretching out. I am untethered. I have let go.

The laundry room walls are close on both sides, a tucked away room off the hall adjacent to my daughter’s where I can hear her singing. She is packing for her freshmen year in college, and the world I’ve known for 18 years feels shaky around me. Father, whom have I been, and what am I becoming?

There were seasons when turning my attention to God had a rhythm that was regular but anything but predictable. When the kids were at school, and the house was quiet for a few hours, I would lay on the floor, my hands pressed to the wood, my knees on the carpet. I’d place my journal near me because I found that transcribing our conversations–words too kind and intensely loving to be my own–helped me hear them. It became an exercise in discernment. I was learning the sound of his voice in my heart; I was learning to trust that the words weren’t just thoughts of my own.  

I will not tire of this—my fascination with people and my desire to understand what it means for them to feel alive, curious, and filled with wonder. People who live fully awake to the weight of their selves are irresistible. There is nothing more attractive, alluring, and captivating.

Can you think of someone in your life who feels the weight of their identity? They know who they are because they’ve let themselves feel it. They are not ashamed. They make no excuses about their personality–feeling neither insufficient nor too much. They know they are loved like they are, so shame has no hold on them.

It wasn’t easy to say the words, but it was even crazier to hear them.

My eyes locked on hers when she said them, sure and clear, like the most normal thing in the world. If I could pull each word apart, string it together like the most dangerous lasso, my neck could go right there, the rope threads just where they needed to be. “We’ve all had abortions,” she said. “We’ve all messed up.”

What if listening — truly listening — is what keeps us alive? Not just surviving, but moving in rhythm with the infinite. In the rush, in the noise, in the ache of the world, we forget. But we were made to listen. To breathe. To carry what is vital: love, wisdom, hope. To live fully, heart awake, spirit engaged, wholly his.