Tonight my restlessness had me feeling as though I would implode. I needed to get out, so I put on my MBT's and walked to the woods, to my stream. I felt suffocated, the way a mother who loves her children more than anything feels when she simultaneously feels she would give anything to be given a complete break from them, incapable of handling anymore of the 24/7 routine that comes along with summer vacation.
The tension seemed unbeatable, like a walk could do something about my emotional mission impossible! But on I walked. I just walked on. Not a workout kind of walk where you pump your arms and check your pulse. A walk, for God's sake, the kind where you just put one foot in front of the other.
With the wind whispering in the tree tops, I could feels its silky touch across my skin as it lifted my bangs out of my ponytail. Yet the turmoil within continued to keep its ironclad grip on my throat. So I kept on. After passing the last house before reaching the soccer fields I saw something that made me stop dead in my tracks.
The first ripened raspberry of the summer. A held out hand. Words of consolation. The warming comfort of an unselfish hug.
From that moment on things started to change. The wildflowers, some as tall as me, danced in their colorful skirts, a palette of colors and textures that could shame the fullest, brightest rainbow. The scents in the air intoxicated me and emptied my brain from all the conflicting thoughts that had invaded my mind. And as though the Universe was trying to draw some kind of paralell to where I was at that moment, the lilypads on the stream promised that their flowers would soon emerge from the moody mud banks below.
When I passed the same place where the raspberries were growing on my way back home, I helped myself to two more. And it dawned on me that never have I come back from a walk feeling anything other than better than I did before going.
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