Sorrow lessens but it does not go away. Being a Scorpio, I am determined to get to the bottom of things, so I have studied sorrow as well as lived it.

Being a spiritual student, I have also studied the words of the great masters and they have brought me much consolation, but no free ticket out of sorrow.

As a born writer, I have always loved words, both serious and comical. I weave them into potholders of essays and give them away on my website. It is the only thing I can find to do that comes naturally to me.

This essay is writing itself and I am hard-pressed to give up the reins and let it say what it will. Cruelty, there is so much of it going around and it is a part of everyone’s makeup. Let no one tell you otherwise. Children taunt each other cruelly on the playground; being different is to be heckled.

My daughter’s baldness from chemo isolated her from the other children that she loved so much. She became the ugly duckling for a time, but when she died, it was as a swan. It was as someone that had elevated sorrow and given it back as peace. She has been gone over forty years now. No one speaks of her; there are no words.

As for me, all of my striving has not amounted to a hill of beans. But I have learned the lessons of sorrow well. From it I have carved out my list of statements that all of you who read me know:

I am in God’s presence now.
I choose to love myself.
Work hard gathering energy when you have no problems.
If it’s right for me, it’s right for the universe.

I see truth come alive as I sit with these sentences and the sentence of life becomes elevated into grace.

Vicki Woodyard