1.

Not everyone can say 'Well Done" and mean it. That's a Spiritual Accomplishment.

Not everyone can offer encouragement that makes a heavy load lighter and a hard Road milder. That's a Spiritual Accomplishment.

And not everyone knows how to listen without translating what is said into something already familiar and understood.

If you want to learn something useful, start here.

2.

Well done. You’ve made it this far. 

Though the days shut you in like a tomb. The sky was a heavy stone lid. And the grief was compacted and just stuck there. You couldn’t get it out. It becomes just a heaviness, and a dullness, and nothing seems to change. There is

No Way Out. Except, maybe, downriver, if the current can be caught, give in and catch it, till the gulls start barking and there’s salt in the air and the smell of seaweed.

Turbid estuary. Boats keeled over in the green mud. Maybe.

I can’t tell. From where I am. I’ve forgotten what it felt like.

3.

The room we enter, is whatever room we were already in. So what changes?

Is it the presence of another? But there is no other there. 

Or if there is, she was always there.

What makes the hands come together, palm to palm, with fingers pointing upwards?

A silence that says

I am here. It was always you who went away.