Last week my poor husband had surgery to fix his broken foot. He came out of the operation with multiple industrial pins hammered through each metatarsal and with some ligament repair around his big toe.

It will take several months for the wounds to heal, and then the pins can come out. The hope is that the connective tissue will regrow, and the torn spaces between the bones will knit back together.

When I look at it, I imagine the complexity of the brilliant design underneath the skin. And watching him hump around with his crutches, I’m reminded how crucial the toes and foot are.

The way the bones and joints move together, held by muscles and ligaments. It is an amazing architecture that bears our heavy weight as we walk and run and move through our days. Which makes the foot so uniquely vulnerable.

Grief is like this, I think.

When we lose someone, the death shakes the scaffolding. We are shattered and shocked, sometimes even unable to function. Emotions rip and lacerate our souls, as they drive down deep into our very marrow.

Day after day, the soft, vulnerable parts of ourselves continue to feel tender and bruised. Like a fractured foot, we doubt, oh we doubt, that we will ever walk again.

Some days we take a step or two, but the pain levels us.

But deep inside, the work of healing is taking place. The rent spaces reach toward one another to join, to weave together, cell by cell. Our blood transports new pathways. Our severed nerves lace together to heal.

It is a dark, unseen, mysterious process.

But it does happen.

The thing about a foot is that you can never forget it, it is there in front of your eyes with every step, every place you go.

So it is with loss, even when your swollen sadness subsides, it can never be forgotten, it’s always felt in a peripheral, but constant way.

Our tendons can be stitched up, but they will always be vulnerable. And so it is that we carry the memories of love, and of loss.

But then there is a new thing.

A thing both fragile but reinforced.

The other day I was running and stopped to cry because I was thinking about and missing my mom. Around the holidays, I always miss her so profoundly. It is an ache, like a phantom pain, because I can’t always pinpoint the locus.

But, as with an injured foot, I know how to push down the pain. And I can ignore the genesis of the grief itself, and just keep moving on.

Or I can just let the tears come, let the fractured bone of loneliness push into my muscle memory, allow it to gouge and ultimately cripple me.

And it does.

But this new thing, I see through a kind of x-ray of my interior, a captured image of my 57 year old life, my well-worn body.

I imagine empty black spaces, and darkness layered over with shadows. I see cavities of uncertainty, and even outright fear.

But there are also hard, bright, white bones and buoyant vertebrae. And pliant, flexible fascia.

Broken or whole, crushed, or pinned back together again, it is a body that holds pain without allowing the integrity to break apart irreparably.

I know I will never walk, or run, or move at all, in the same way. This foot, this grief, it walks with me, it carries this worn and scarred body.

And I think about about regeneration, recovery, and injury and repair.

And I will wonder at the strange, unfathomable ability life has to break down, and then somehow gather itself up, and then re-create something functional, and oh so beautiful, and altogether new.

To make a prairie, it takes a clover and a bee

A clover and one bee.

And revery.

but revery alone will do

if bees are few.

– Emily Dickinson

revery: A state of dreamy meditation or fanciful musing; a daydream; a fantastic, visionary, or impractical idea.

Where to find those golden moments of inspiration? The sugared energy that sweetens and distills the lazy meanderings of the dull and depressed mind?

Because today my own hive-mind is dry, with dusty, crenellated tunnels that lead nowhere.

There’s no queen to muster up motivation, no encouraging brood mates, no honey to drip from the sticky comb as a reward from the day’s hard work.

Instead my brain buzzes lazily across the summer yard, trying to bring back something worthy, something of use.

Some piece of myself to add to the buzz of inane conversation all around me. Words that flit and fly across the yard, words to transport and transform.

All it takes is one bee.

But as every honeybee knows, we cannot fly without the murmur of breath beneath our wings.

Without the wisp of breeze, there is no circling with intent, instead we humbly crawl across the lawn, to be trampled by a foot or lost in the mounds of grass.

We want a purpose, we want a community to share our short but productive little lives. And a warm home for our tiny, fragile paper-wings to fold and rest.

And so we circle and fly, labor and die.

This is how it is to write.

I travel to discover how huge the world actually is.

I travel to realize that it is not that big after all.

I travel to be an outsider, a stranger completely ignorant of the local dialect.

I travel to understand that there is a universal tongue: a smile, a nod, a small attempt by someone to help me find my way.

I travel to be a stranger, an American, carrying the weight of that stigma.

I travel to maybe show a different face of my country’s reputation.

I travel to sleep in a bed lovingly made up for me by the hostess of the house.

I travel for the sweet, weary moment when I come home and fall onto my familiar mattress in my own bedroom.

I travel to see the history of a city, one that is thousands of years older than my own.

I travel to appreciate my relatively new hometown, one that is small enough to recognize my individuality.

I travel to indulge my senses – to taste an array of cheeses: raw milk made of cow, goat and sheep, and bleu varieties injected with blue veins of famous bacteria.

I travel to spend weeks without seeing a fast food chain or box store.

I travel to let go. To ride in a taxi that stops and starts and careens across the Roman night, swaying and weaving in a dance between motorcycles, cars and pedestrians. I absorb the blur of color and light, letting my spirits fly and my adrenaline soar.

I travel to appreciate the calm and tranquility of my sleepy North Carolina hometown’s cadence.

I travel to take advantage of the fact that I am able to do it, that I have a husband and kids who push me along, sometimes beyond the limits of where I want to go.

I travel because I was luckily offered the opportunity through my husband’s work.

I travel to get lost, to reinforce the fact that getting lost can happen anywhere, in any city.

I travel to appreciate that desperate rescue, those arms that hold me tight as I shiver and cry because I can’t find the way back to our apartment.

I travel to be a part of a large, Italian extended family, to experience a meal that has been lovingly assembled over the entire day.

I travel to appreciate my blood family, with our peripatetic planning of quick leftover meals and sporadic get-togethers.

I travel to come upon an unexpected pomegranate tree, plump and red tucked beneath old, gnarly branches.

I travel to remember those same exotic trees when I shop – their weird, bumpy fruits in the small bin at Whole Foods, with the knowledge of just how far they have travelled.

I travel to see a region where life is literally squeezed out of ancient plants, plump grapes and firm dusty olives, slowly ripening on the sunny hillsides.

I travel to expand my own limited palate. The drip of different olives, sweet and green and musky black, and the assortments of wines from last year’s harvest of grapes.

I travel to better experience the bitter fact that over-imbibed, limoncello is a poison, no matter how yellowy sweet and innocent and pretty it’s colorful bottle.

I travel to validate the idea that what is shunned in one culture may be treasured in another. That the feral cats that we euthanize, are protected cat communities, in Rome, not to be disrupted.

I travel to do the things that people recommend for me to do, but also to ignore those dictums too. The Roman Coliseum is just as impressive seen from a hillside, without paying the the ticket price and waiting for hours to go inside.

I travel to do all of the kitschy tourist things too. There’s a reason why millions of people travel from far-flung places to experience them, after all.

I travel to shop for things I wouldn’t dream of buying at home: outrageously priced Italian shoes and bags, a handmade artisan candle in Rome.

I travel to give myself permission to be a more colorful version of myself: More chic, more cultured (quoting Fellini) and someone more gastronomically sophisticated.

I travel to make myself vulnerable: to always feel like I’m on my toes, alert, not completely comfortable. Maybe it might help with the aging process?

I travel to broaden my view of what the world can be. So when I am home, cooking, doing the dishes, or running on the trail, or just daydreaming, I can summon up memories.

I travel to somehow, in a tiny way, share a larger community in this wide, juicy, delicious world.

To venture out, to risk, with the hope that when I come home, completely saturated and sated, I might still be ready at some later date down the road, to go adventuring again.

I travel to lose myself, and also to find myself when I am lost.

I am running around, trudging up and down the stairs, gathering items to throw into my suitcase for this next 2 week trip to Europe. How many times have I done this?

This morning I take a moment to turn my head to the window as I round the stair landing. Half a block away, and high in the sky, against the crisp blue, is a ball of bright, cherry red color. And it takes me a moment to realize what it is.

It’s the final fruit of the neighbors’ magnolia tree, those flat seeds that slither from the cone-shaped pods of the spent blossoms.

They are not really the last phase of the tree’s yearly effort, because the magnolia is a busy, showy specimen that gives and gives and offers up surprising delights all year round.

And each phase is distinct and unusual.

Of course I love the soft, limpid flowers in the summer – their lush creaminess and intoxicating fragrance – who could not? But they are short lived beauties. If you bring them inside they will become brown overnight and droop their musty heads in sadness.

And after that there comes the nut brown, prickly pods that seem to serve no apparent function.

Until the seeds.

They squeeze up silently, slipping from the ordinary stems and seemingly overnight they are pinched from the fuzz. I think they are seeds, but why in October?

And then the rough pods will darken and shrug back into the tree for the winter, and we think no more of them. But my, the green gloss of the waxy plant leaves, that cluster so perfectly, catch our attention yet again.

And soon it will be Advent and the mantle will need adorning. But even then, once cut, the cuttings will stubbornly list and fall in the most gangly and imperfect variations. But we love them anyway – their festive green color, their vigor, their ability to survive yet another year.

There is something so elusive and impermanent about the Southern magnolia that captivates me.

In the Spring, just as all things fuzzy and soft begin to emerge, so too the almost obscenely pink pods emerge. I reach out to touch them, they are like huge furry tongues, alive and fertile, ready to be awaked by the warmth and sun.

To me, there seems to be a metaphor in every bit of nature. It reflects our own moods, our own bodies and may even provide insight into the life cycle that we share more intimately than we know.

I know that tonight when I sit in the artificial, unnatural cabin of the airplane, borne off to a place far from home, when I close my eyes I will imagine the red seeds, how they caught my attention, even within all of the rush and worry of the day.

I will imagine them as bright cherry eyes, awake and alert, and waiting for my return home, for my pause, my notice and reflection. Because we are somehow connected, my eye and the little seed. And if I take the time to slow down, I know that the moment of observation can be ripe and full of possibility.

It seems like nature calls out to me, especially in October. Saying farewell to the bounty of Summer, that time that is ripe with all of the gifts that have unwrapped before my eyes, without even a careless thanks from me.

Gratitude means slowing down, paying attention, and reflecting on these red seeds and all of the tiny things that shine out with all of the power of Nature.

They are quietly waiting for me to discover them, for me to really take the time to try to see.