Healing and peace “in between”

I just got home from my post-lunch walk in the fields near my host family’s house. 

The weather has gotten cold again, dropping almost 30 degrees (Fahrenheit) overnight. The sky is heavy with grey-white clouds and the Rockies, which are usually visible from here, are hidden behind the snow already rolling in. 

The fields were quiet, apart from the geese calling and some mysterious bird of prey screeching. 

I could hear my heavy steps, my heart racing from my thyroid gone berserk. My health is still very shaky and all I can do to exercise is a short daily walk in my neighborhood. 

Today was peaceful as the snow flakes started to fall in the quiet atmosphere, as everything was sort of wrapped up in a quilt. The snow that covered the fields from the last snow-fall a couple weeks ago is almost completely melted but the ponds are still mostly frozen over. So today for the first time I ventured out on one of the frozen ponds, gingerly watching my step, feeling excited and happy in a simple way, like a child. 

This morning I started a new notebook for my journaling: a nice notebook that I got myself yesterday in a bookstore. 

Something has shifted. 

I’m still in between. In between sickness and health. In between winter and spring. In between Colorado and California. And yet today I feel a quiet peace within me. I feel more tranquil and grounded. I feel healed. Like I’ve turned a new page — like the new notebook I’ve started. Sure, the pages are still blank: my future, my decisions, my next steps haven’t been written yet, they are still mysterious and mostly unknown. But this sense of healing coming from the final closure with the “boulderer” is profound, like water from rain showers trickling into the ground, running deeply into the soil, and thus reaching the roots of the trees, infusing them with new — gentle but steady — life. 

I’m loving this winter here: I love it here in general and often feel that I’d like to move and settle here. This new sense of healing, though, is trickling into my relationship with that place in California where I had lived for four and a half years: I almost feel like I’d be “emotionally ready” to move back. 

It’s no time for a final decision for me, yet, and as unsettling as it may be, I’ll keep holding the “in between” for now: but I also want to celebrate this calmness of today’s “in between”, the renewed peace of this winter-spring enveloping me today, mindful that tomorrow might be different. 

This is today: a healing from “in between”; something as of yet unknown opening up while something else closed peacefully.