"Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.”
-Henry David Thoreau



Today I was reading Anne Lamott's Travelling Mercies. This excerpt stood out to me:

"All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without direct experience of grief, will not heal it...We are a world in grief, and it is at once intolerable and a great opportunity. I'm pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness in a naked and immediate way that we come to be healed--which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace...

and then, finally, grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination."