The morning air is cool on my face. The slick soles of my boots threaten to slip off the bike pedals with each spoke turn.

I cross the street, passing just one walker, his arms swinging quickly down the wide street. Then I make one right turn, one left turn, and another right. In three minutes, I am turning onto Main Street, the sidewalks filled with potted Christmas trees glistening with red and silver in the morning sun.

It rained earlier this week, and the air is still moist. I breathe through my nose, feeling the air expand my lungs. I turn onto the sidewalk outside a coffee shop and pull my bike up to a bike stand shaped like a red metal coffee mug. I can see Justin in the window, perched on a counter stool, laptop open. People press together in line for coffee, and I ease my way in, past the giant body of a Grand Pyrenees who also, perhaps, likes expresso. Its huge brown eyes look up at its owner, who is deep in conversation as she stands in line. I tell Justin I am tempted to burrow my face in the dog’s thick black and white fur.

Stand. See what I see.

The drive is short—just five minutes—from my house.

On the way, I look at the Christmas decorations in front of the houses: poinsettias in ivory and crimson, lights in multicolor and white, a manger scene in the middle of a lawn, adult-sized toy soldiers heralding walkers on the sidewalk with stationary trumpets and bright, merry eyes.

I love it. It feels like goodness. Like possibility. Like hope.

I delayed writing this because I feared my writing would masquerade as action. And action, not talk, is what is required of me now.

“Do not stay in the shallows,” He says, and I wonder if processing His words will help me do so: leave the shallows and go to the deeper place where my heart is one with His.

I am sitting at a window near the front of the house where I can see the giant rose bush through the glass. Up at the top, one rose opens to the December sun. Beneath its peach petals are thick flowerless branches armored with thorns. I study them, remembering the feeling of falling in a nest of rose bushes as a child—and the precarious dance I do as an adult in the spring and summer, deadheading stalks so more flowers can bloom.

Today, I am not at ease with myself, which is the opposite of what you hear people my age and older say.

I am supposed to say, “I’ve never felt more like myself. I have settled into a newfound freedom as I care less about what people think of me and am less tied down by the attitude of striving.” And I usually feel that way.

But I resonate with both mindsets: I care less about what people think of me and feel good about balancing work, rest and play. But still, I feel listless and confused. There is an edge I think I am missing.

Perhaps I have become complacent? Where has my desperation for God gone?

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.