Today’s message went like this:
“Still, it is the heart’s capacity to rise one more time after falling down, no matter how bruised, that verifies such a drive within us, too.”
Today my hospice patient passed away and once again I am called upon to shoulder loss. It is safe to say “I feel like a salmon swimming upstream”. Here on the cape we have the herring, like the salmon, returning to their birthplace. You can go watch them at a place near me called Herring Run. Recently the Cape Cod Times announced this annual event and published a photo of a herring pushing against that white rushing water.
A few days later I read something interesting about the run of the herring and salmon. Most of us think it’s the rushing water that holds the fish back and makes them work so hard, when in effect, it’s the rushing water that guides their path. The fish instinctively know that if they are pushing thru water, there is no rock or debris in their path so they navigate the stream by swimming wherever the rushing water is.
Today, as I find myself pushing against more rushing water, I will take it as divine guidance that I’m not going to smash nose first into a rock. Pushing on is tiring, and sometimes draining, for both me and the fish, but at least we’re moving and not stuck in a roadblock.
And so, as another day goes by, I take some quiet time in my garden in honor of my patient, seek the rushing water, and…I have written.
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