Letter: Still Walking Her Home

As I write this today, July 29, I am 46 miles away from my goal of a 100-mile summer of hiking through the mountains of Washington’s Cascades and Olympics and along the Pacific Coast.

I just took off one day, a very special day, the one year anniversary of my wife’s homegoing. I lost her to cancer on the first day of spring after 50 years of marriage.

And I kept going back, walking old trails she and I had walked before, seeking new trails where I’d never been, wandering among the beautiful creations of majestic mountains, and mysterious lakes, and meadows of flowers.

I am irresistibly drawn, almost as if I had no choice in the matter, to be where beauty abounds.

Where my soul is restored.

Where my spirit is refreshed.

Where my strength is renewed.

Where what I unknowingly require returns, where what I have lost is found.

Peace. And joy.

‘Waters of quietness’ is how one commentator describes the Psalmist David’s deliberations as he described the mysterious magic working upon his own heart as he must have sat on some mountain lake shore, as I did at Heart Lake high in the Olympics this past Monday on what would have been my 52^nd Anniversary.

I wasn’t ‘supposed’ to have been there. I had made a ‘wrong’ turn. But as it turned out, I was supposed to have been there after all.

‘When my spirit is exhausted, weary, troubled and sad, anxious and worn down, there beside still water I am filled with new joy.’

“Not stagnant waters,” the commentary continues of Psalm 23, “but waters not tempestuous and stormy; rather waters so calm, gentle, and still, as to suggest the idea of repose.”

As the waters of Heart Lake where the reflection of the moon is caught in the stillness of a new dawn.

Where snow melting from the ridge above splashes its way down into Heart Lake and Heart Lake then leaks, like tears, over the precipice and into the valley below.

From Heart Lake, this most beautiful quiet place, I climbed the peak, rested, and then descended.

As I continued to walk her home.