"Courage is a love affair with the unknown." ~Osho
I'm sitting on a fishing pier in The Galleon Bay on South Padre Island.
The hot Texas sun glistens on the water as it laps against wooden boat docks. The wind lifts my hair all around me.
I feel like Drew Barrymore in Fire Starter.
A woman with fiery red hair in a thick french twist casts her line in the water. She reels it in and casts again. A bearded man in a white apron flips steaks on a grill. Wafts of charcoal smoke curl up into question marks all around me.
I'm breathing it all in--waiting for the words to come. That's how you know you're a writer. You swallow up everything around you and spit it back out in words.
I started writing after Cohen died.
Perhaps I had swallowed far, far too much sorrow. Yet, my insides were empty and bloated with grief. I could not contain it all. I guess I'm a little bit Taylor Swift. When I get my heart broken, I have to write about it.
Sorrow comes out through my fingertips.
Every heartbreak contains within it an epiphany. It's a lot like a fortune cookie. Sometimes we have to be cracked wide open to find profound wisdom inside.
When my baby died I had lots of questions. Actually, I still do. But now, instead of needing answers, I am learning to make friends with uncertainty.
Questions encircle me like wafts of charcoal air and I breathe them in.
I am learning to live inside the tension they create. The tension between restlessness and fulfillment. Between happiness and sorrow. Between childlike faith and manifold disbelief.
Questions are what stretch us into what we are becoming. Questions are the rubberbands that catapult us forward on the slingshot of life.
It takes courage to live with questions. And courage is a love affair with the unknown. Her gaze is shrouded in mystery.
But when you touch her, she feels like home.
