Wild, Like a Wood Sorrell Bloom On the Forest Floor

I discovered a precious gift today. It bubbled up out of the memories of my childhood experience of emotional and physical abandonment by my well-intentioned, but oh so young, parents. My mother passed away on August 30th, and I have been immersed in the process of releasing and healing the past. This process includes lots of memories, and lots of choices about what to remember, what to treasure, and what to release and leave in the years gone by.

Oh, the anguish from walking the path of a solitary child, an unattached existence, wild, like a wood sorrel bloom timid on the silent forest floor. And now, to know its transformation into a deep appreciation for this life, led and fed, by a power and a love greater than any parent could have ever given me.

From a renewed look through years distant from those days this gift rose up. The gift--a perspective, cultivated and honed from a lifetime of walking without the closeness, the unconditional love of family. The gift—a deep appreciation for the solitude, un-enmeshed from the emotional dysfunction of the family I was born into. The gift—I now have the wisdom, temperament, and strength to hold my sister as she agonizes through the pain of the immediate family members crashing against each other.

I embrace this capacity born out of the wound as a precious gift.