The Grace of Returning

I have built temples out of quiet moments.
I have found the sacred in a dripping faucet,
found profound answers to love in a simple prepared meal.

Yet I have also been blind to the softness of a sunset,
said “I love you” out of habit,
and missed the invitation in Willow’s joyful greeting when I arrived home.
There have been times when both the birds’ song
and the crickets’ symphony went completely unnoticed.

Sometimes the clouds are too thick,
and visibility is only a single heartbeat ahead.
Sometimes the ceaseless storms flood the streets,
making the path to my temples impassable.
I toil through my days, one foot in front of the other,
grasping at unseen handholds in the dark,
uncertain of what my hands clasp.

There are moments when I unclench my fists
to find that I have been holding fear,
careful in its disguise as anger,
hiding its roots from my seeing.
In other moments, the blaring warnings of the world,
tangled in us versus them,
trap me within disastrous headlines,
leaving my heart caught in the knotted strands of division.

Sometimes it lasts a few hours, sometimes a few days,
and yes… there have been times I’ve been lost for months.

Until I find my way back to the quiet.

It is only within the embrace of quiet
that I can hear the inhale and exhale
of the truth of my being.
It is only within the beauty of solitude
that the shouts of the world fall away,
the haze clears,
and I have the presence to see the beauty
that has been before my eyes all along.

⸻

There was a time I thought awakening meant staying awake, that once I saw beauty, I would never again forget it. But awareness isn’t something we keep; it drifts, it dims, it hides behind exhaustion and noise. There are days when I move through the world half-asleep, when the sky is generous with light and I am too tangled in thought to receive it. There are weeks when I feel numb to the very things that once saved me. I used to think that meant I was failing, that losing sight of wonder made me unworthy of it.

But I see now that forgetting is part of being human. Each return to quiet is a kind of prayer, each remembering a soft awakening. This, I think, is the grace of returning, the understanding that to be human is to wander and to come home again to the ordinary holiness of life. To me, these are the quiet temples, the sacred spaces built within our days, where presence becomes gratitude, and gratitude becomes love.