Between places, something remains.
🌿 1. Arrival into transition
There are moments when many things begin to shift at once, quietly, unexpectedly, without asking for our permission. Something we could not have predicted or planned.
I did not expect this transition.
And yet, here I am, standing at the edge of parting.
Parting with the trees, the bushes, the birds who became my quiet companions. The branches that once held a small wren, gently sheltering him when a kind volunteer returned him to the open sky.
I find myself between places.
I think about the beginning and the end of my days, walking to the bridge beneath the trees, pausing to listen to the soft whisper of the wind moving through leaves, greeting the bushes as if they could hear me, gently lifting small snails from the pavement and placing them back into the cool, damp grass.
These moments were never extraordinary.
And yet, they became everything.
And now, I am leaving. Suddenly, without warning, without a choice.
🌱 2. Encounters
🌼 The lady from the train.
There are people we meet only briefly, and yet something in the encounter stays.
Recently, I met a young woman on the train. For a moment, it felt as if we had known each other for a long time. There was an ease in our conversation, a quiet recognition that needed no explanation.
She spoke of her work with children, of her love for animals, of gently saving ladybugs and rolley-pollies from harm. There was a lightness in her presence, a kind of sincerity that brightened an otherwise ordinary day.
And then, just as gently as it appeared, the moment passed.
🌿 The deer.
Not every moment asks us to act.
Some ask us simply to witness.
One morning, I heard a cry, sharp and unfamiliar. I paused and listened. When crying came again, I followed the sound and found a young deer standing behind a construction fence, only a few feet away.
His eyes were wide and uncertain, and his body was still but alert.
My first instinct was to help, to guide him out, to do something. But I hesitated. I felt the fragility of the moment, the risk of fear, the possibility of harm.
So I stepped back.
Sometimes, care does not mean intervention.
Sometimes, it means trusting life to find its own way.
🌼 The flowers
And sometimes, what we think we are leaving behind quietly finds us again.
The same flowers that lined my path from the train, delicate, familiar, appeared one evening at the entrance of a small neighborhood store. Their petals moved softly in the wind, catching the same light I had come to recognize.
For a moment, I simply stood there.
It did not feel like a coincidence.
It felt like a gentle reminder that not everything ends when we walk away.
🌿 3. I care, but I cannot hold everything
I am beginning to notice how many moments pass through my life that I cannot keep.
There is a quiet ache in meeting and releasing.
In caring deeply, and still having to let go.
I want to hold on.
To carry these places, these beings, these encounters with me in their original form.
But I cannot.
I cannot remain.
I cannot gather everything dear to my heart and bring it with me.
And perhaps… I am not meant to.
🌳 4. Realization when something gentle begins to settle
I have been looking for answers.
And slowly, something softer is beginning to take shape.
Maybe not everything is meant to stay in the same form.
Maybe connection is not something we keep around us, but something we carry within us.
Carried in memory.
In the quiet spaces of the heart.
In the unseen threads that continue, even when distance appears.
I am beginning to understand that presence does not end when proximity disappears.
What we have truly met,
what we have truly felt,
does not leave us.
🌼 5. Closing
The walnut tree will still be there.
The small rituals of my days, the noticing, the pausing, the quiet care, remain with me. I can return when I can. And even when I cannot, something of that place continues to live within me.
I am still here, carrying what I have been so graciously given.
A gift of connection.
A gift of presence.
Some things do not leave.
They simply change the way they stay.
I am not losing these moments.
I am learning to carry them forward.
What matters does not disappear.
It becomes part of me. 🌼
🌿 ✨ Final Blessing
May I trust the quiet threads that weave through my days
the meetings, the partings, the moments that arrive without warning.
May I soften my need to hold everything,
and rest in the knowing that what is real does not disappear.
May the beings who cross my path, human, animal, and unseen,
remain gently alive within me,
as I remain a small, living part of their story.
And as I move from one place to another,
may I carry not the weight of what is leaving,
but the light of what has been given. 🌼