heart swell

tonite an old friend wrote me, and made my heart swell (that's a good thing ~ though it sounds medically unsound).

i'm in a mood where i want to gather all those who i feel i truly love together in one big group hug, where somehow i have my arms around each one of them at the same time, and whisper, thank you, thank you for being you and for letting me be me and for just loving the best you know how.

but then, i thought how i would love to have a thousand evenings to just sit with david and each one of them, by one's or twos and just soak up their presence and BE around them and try to make them know by my smiles and pats and gutteral sympathies and awkward and ill-timed phrases, that i love them.

i've been thinking, as usual, as i go about, about a billion and one other things i want to tell the world about, in a feeble attempt at helping them, whoever "they" are "understand", without loss of shine though i know my putting down the letters is mostly all for naught, for many or most, secret or not.

saturday i took a walk. in a woods. the divine spirit must've led me there.
i left the house with no intent on where to go, only knowing that i MUST drive, MUST get away, could not stand to be with myself and my family one more minute, not permanantly of course, but for at least something that felt like awhile. my soul felt like a rabid caged animal. it panted to be "free", simulated though that freedom may be.

i rammed down the gas pedal and drove as fast as i dared, straight east.
as i drove, a destination vaguely emerged in my mind. i listened to NPRs CarTalk, the sun shone in it's springy way and my heart lightened. i only had a vague notion of how to get where i though i was going. and in retrospect, i only Now realize that i should've turned left, instead of right to get there. but really, i think something outside/inside (?) of me guided my direction, some magnetic directional force.

i found the right place, called Stillwater Praire. a well tended group of trails, near a river, for pedestrian type hiking in a marvelous variety of wooded and praire setting that did my heart good. i walked. i sat in the sun and read entries in an old journal. i walked some more. i saw a tree turned beehive and was please at the humming of it's busy inhabitants, having recently been well educated on the lifestyle of bees spurned by yosie's interest in them.

i accidently, but decisively, took the path to the praire and was gifted with the privilege of making eye contact from a coyote (at a comfortable, but briefly heartstopping, distance). i happened upon a broken but beautiful clam shell on the edge of the praire path of all places. i felt that someone had left a token to help me understand my soul.

i found a bucolic pond just waiting for a lovers picnic and observed by squinting a bevy of turtles sunning themselves on a mossy log. i nearly parted with the shell, but ran back, up a steep hill, to retrieve it. i washed it in the river, led by a tiny frog.

i arrived back home, still a bit raw, as if scrubbed clean, but whole. i gave yosie the shell, as an apology gift. *sigh*