Sturdy, Sage

I leaned over the rail of the cabin's second story. The ground below was covered in pine needles, like dull brown grass.  The pines towered over the other trees, sprawled out like sentries. The needles fell from their great height, hitting the ground with a sharp whisper. The terrain fell sharply, the cabins built into the side of those steep slopes, defying gravity. 

I gazed ahead.

A leaf fell from above, but fell so slowly, flipping and turning so often in its descent, I thought it would never reach the ground. I never saw a leaf fall so slowly, so elegantly. I would have had time to run down the stairs and across the yard to catch it, to prevent it from touching the earth at all. But I didn't. 

Of course, it was met with the same ending as all the other, inelegant leaves: the fast-falling, the pine needles, the colorful or brown, large or small. They all ended up at the same place, didn't they? On the ground. To be crushed beneath a careless footfall, to be trampled by an anonymous tread. Yet the trees stand proudly, undeterred by the slow and gradual loss of their foliage, their grandeur. They accept the change of time and the turning of the season. They accept loss like hoary-headed philosophers, sturdy and sage. 

I remind myself, then, to gaze not at the leaf, but at the tree. 

Patience

Over time, a great deal of time, her pain gave way to beauty. Her suffering was transformed through tears and the most severe humility to a quietness, an almost imperceptible peace, discerned only by those who knew where to look for it, and knew how to value it. 

She learned to whisper her light into the world, even as it was a speck of light on a black page, or one in a billion stars which nobody ever knew to single out and never got around to naming. She learned to whisper it anyway, a gentle fierceness emerging, certain only that it must be done because it was the right thing to do. 

Over time, like water that travels down a great many pebbles in a stream and journeys slowly over rock and around bend, leaving tender footprints in its wake, her pain did one day become something, something of value to her, and something which no other circumstance would ever be able to take away. She became wise and strong, though she would never suspect either quality to be her own, by virtue of her wisdom, for true wisdom is by its very nature humble. 

All these things took place over time, in and out of seasons, borne of a great deal of suffering and only after countless boring days and weeks which felt futile, wretched, and even entirely wasteful. They took place after interminable seasons of obscurity, loneliness, self-doubt, and confusion. After all, a ship which finds its dock is in no way assumed to have traversed entirely placid seas. Though her journey was stormy, her compass proved true in the end. And it was a beautiful homecoming, indeed.