For Elizabeth Gilbert, Who Walked to the River’s Edge With Rayya

Rayya Elias (Vimeo)

There is loss.

It happens to us even as the soul knows nothing is missing. What we feel we lose has only been transformed, shifted, moved closer to the river. We sit there at its edge and contemplate the way of our going. Where are we going and how do we travel? What have we seen when the distance between the start and the ending was one? Life is to be lived, and we live it fully when there at the edge staring at the ending—the start of a beginning. We hold close to chest our gratitude. We remember what it all meant and where upon the road we traveled. What about the walk causes us to forget? What of its way seems a distraction from the journey itself, until the road comes to no more and the river rests in the quiet? We get one life before matter becomes again the energy inside the dark of light, that which was before our birth and remains the mystery after we’ve given ourselves permission to release again into life’s vastness.

There is loss.

Yet nothing is missing. We lose objects not people. To go within is to know that in any moment we are able to touch the feel of the intangible, that we can call upon the grace of voice of sound of the nudge of intuition in the direction of our true going. Whose listening is steady enough to hear inside the silence? Who is brave enough to drop it all, turn, and walk in the direction of truth’s resonance? Who is willing to crawl through the pain in order to again walk? It is the way of the new. It is the way of transformation that we not forget where we placed our truth, that the objects gone missing be found, and that the one whose final breath rests there at the river floats still about our energy.

There is loss.

There is also gratitude for love and for the moments of our sharing. Even there at the edge of the river where we released our hold, let go of the physical, and said goodbye to now that later might arrive swift—a breeze against my skin, a flower reminiscent of you, a movie that was before your favorite, a piece of music that roared your name, or laughter—do we see that which has no ending, only the again and again of beginnings.

There is loss.

There is also the gift of having been so close to breath, so close to skin.

There is loss.

There is also freedom at the river’s edge of flow, and it is there that you now move along the current. Free.

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