There is so much noise around me that I must shut myself in to hear the quiet speak.

It is within this small space, this tiny home I’ve built that I can find the respite to turn off my brain and turn up my heart. For the city and all of her sounds can sometimes feel like an orchestra and in other moments, feel like I am being trampled and pulled apart.

Such is the case for a sensitive heart. 

To find quiet, sometimes, this means renting a car and driving up north to where the snow lies, untouched by anyone else and where, if I listen carefully in the stillness of the forrest, I can hear the messages the wind carries.

Let us be clear: I am more alone than I am together with others and most days, I’m quite fine with that.

I am building a new family with each beat of my heart and though for the most part they have fur and four legs, my reach of family extends to parts of the world where this magical thing called the internet has reached and maybe my voice, by phone, a little bit further.

So I am alone; yet, I am not. I am an oddball and awkward and some of the time I feel like I am still, at this older age, adjusting to the way this body moves, the way this brain thinks, the way this heart beats—and yet, I am as gracious (and calloused) and human and beautiful as a ballerina.

I am wisdom and value and I know it all.

I am everything and nothing, too.

And so (“so” is my favorite word lately and I’m not sure when this happened, but so it has) I am a lone ranger. Like my father—maybe, sometimes; like my mother, definitely—and like the parents of my parents and the parents before them. I walk the line, I walk to this own beat, the one I hear when I close my eyes; the one echoed by my feet and sometimes (most times) it makes no sense at all and other times (most times) it makes all the sense in the world.

We are here to walk to the beat of our own hearts and there is no other beat we can attune ourselves to.

And sometimes, this means we walk alone.

If I close my eyes in this moment and think what it means to walk alone this is what I see: the desert. A long stretch of sand, on fire with the sun, the heat is so hot that my face might melt away but here I am. There is only me and this body and this heart and my job is to follow my own path. I must stop every so often and tune into the part of me that knows which way to walk; that knows where the water is—where the tree waits, coolness wrapped under its leaves, ready to shade me and allow me some rest.

Does life feel like this for anyone else? Like you are alone in a desert and that it is you that must find the place you can rest to collect yourself to keep going? That it is you that will reach the edge of the world and will in that moment, make the decision to jump off the edge, into the unknown land of what happens next?

So I am alone, yes—and yet I am surrounded by the greatest love that has ever existed.

It may not speak the language I do in every moment, but sometimes, (most times) I catch the wave and before I know it my heart is alive and inspired and I can see the forest for the trees.

Want 15 free additional reads weekly, just our best?

Get our weekly newsletter.

 Photo: still from Amelie