This past weekend found us all traveling in different directions.  My husband to a long planned golf weekend, the kids to their grandparents house, and me to the wedding of an old childhood friend.

I don’t like when we’re all apart.

Alone in my bed in a strange new place, fear woke me in the night; a film reel of worst-case scenarios playing on my movie screen mind.

But then I remembered the poem a dear friend had shared.  We had talked of the power of love and fear and how thoughts of losing it all can climb onto our pillows in the middle of the night and blow uncertainty right into our ears.

Her friendship and the poem she shared, assured me I wasn’t alone in thinking such thoughts, and allowed me to leave my restless bed and create a soothing place, perhaps by a stream or a quiet lake on a soft bed of grass on which to sleep out the rest of my night.

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS  by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.