On Wild and Free, Soft and Secret

The instant I felt the air shift toward cooler and darker, I knew I’d write about it. A week later, and I’m still processing. 

If you know me, you know I love to ride my four-wheeler. There’s a wild freedom, an escape, a transformation that I only feel as I work my way up through the gears and away from life’s stress. Maybe I’d feel the same astride a horse, but I don’t have a horse; instead, I’m astride a Honda. Henry David Thoreau said, “All good things are wild and free.” I doubt he meant a middle-aged fatty on a four-wheeler, but let’s pretend he did. I mean, he didn’t even know about four-wheelers, right?

As much as I love zooming down the road and trails, away from sorrow and responsibility and reality, the most wonderful sensation lands the moment the trail slides from sunshine to shade, the light from glaring to dim. In that moment, the soft secret space – of the trail, the farm, the day, my life – cocoons me and I am at peace. That feeling – mind and body – is what Thoreau meant. Wild, free, and undeniably good. 

I don’t always ride into those gentle pockets of air; sometimes I forget they exist until I round a curve in the trail, the sky disappears, and I’m in a sanctuary of earth and trees, of soft cool air and gentle breeze. 

If I could bottle that feeling, life would be easier.

I’m still working to find soft secret spaces in my life, but this search is more intentional than my rides through the woods. In my day-to-day life – in this unrequested life of mine – those moments of reprieve are so necessary and so varied. Some days, I slip into the quiet calm of my craft room and practice some pseudo-art. Other days, the buzz of power tools brings its own peace. Always, the farm – the soft-secret-space-sharer for so many of us – soothes my soul. And tonight, twelve parents gathered in a church basement were balm for my aching heart.

This is my “season.” Twenty-three days separate the anniversary of Cooper’s death and his birthday. Maybe as the years progress those 23 days will be gentler, but now, two years along this path, those are 23 rough days. Last night, I wondered if I’d be able to keep it together for tonight’s Compassionate Friends meeting. I was trying to prepare for the meeting and just . . . couldn’t. Nothing was coming together. Eventually, I went to bed and trusted God that I’d be able to finish getting ready today. A few minutes into my lunch hour, the different parts of the meeting came together. Seriously – I think I felt the “click.”

Skip forward a few hours.

Our planned topic was “Meet My Loved One.” I began our meeting as I always do, with a short reading; tonight’s passage came from Gary Roe’s Comfort for the Grieving Parent’s Heart; Hope and Healing after Losing Your Child.

“Remembering is a part of grieving. Talking about our child and telling their story can be a wonderful way to share ourselves and our hearts with those around us. Finding those we can do this with is important – even essential – to our emotional and physical health.
We will talk about them. We will tell their stories. We will live on, with their influence inside us.“

We shared. We talked. We laughed and cried and told stories of our beloved children. We passed pictures around the table, putting faces to the names we’ve uttered for six meetings. We discovered similarities among these beautiful souls who never met on Earth but are surely friends in heaven. Our children were musicians and environmentalists, storytellers and pranksters, artists and adventurers. Tonight, we shared their lives. After the meeting ended, many of us lingered, talking in groups of two or three, making acquaintances for our loves, smoothing an extra layer of balm over the fissures in our hearts.

“Wild and free” takes many forms, but the goal is always the same: soft, secret, sacred peace.