I went out walking yesterday after I posted my latest video. Two women were walking briskly together and we said hello and chatted briefly. One of them said to me, “You always look so good, your hair is beautiful and you look so peaceful. Like you could hear OM around you.”

I, of course, was stunned to hear this. Me who hates her hair and never feels adequate. None of us do, you know. We all see our imperfections and wish we looked different or better. If they only knew how hard I have had to dig to find a tiny source of light within.

The years of hard grief have been lifted, but the song of sorrow is in every cell of my soul. Lately I lay for hours wide awake, before falling asleep towards morning. It is then I dream of old issues that cannot be solved because the people are long dead.

I wake up. It is daylight and I have overslept again. The dream had me entangled in a hopeless situation. Bob was dying (again) and my son and best friend (also dead) were trying to get him to the hospital. When we finally arrived, I was relieved that one of the doctors in his doctor’s practice admitted him swiftly. But then he said, “We’ve found him a room. In the basement.”

I said, “The basement is not a good place to be, is it?” And the nurse said ominously, “No, it isn’t.” And that is when I woke up. It felt so real and so deeply sad. I ate a bowl of cereal and sat in silence for a while.

Then I got dressed and went to the library and had a sandwich out. Now I am back home. Home is where I can be myself, where the silence lives, where I am at ease and restless at one and the same time.

Human life is terribly difficult and totally unpredictable. So I comb my hair and put on makeup and then people like my neighbors think I am something that I am not. We, my friends, are all in the same boat and it is leaking.

I will venture 2 optimistic closing sentences. “To know reality is to know sorrow. And to know sorrow is the beginning of the long journey back to your true home.”

I am in my true home now and I can only be in it now. The sorrow lifts in no other way.

Vicki Woodyard