The engine purrs as she races across the sunny frozen landscape. Mice hunker down in burrows and shiver.

Candace grimaces holding the chain lightly, tears springing to her eyes. Human misery threatens to overtake us all like pain on a canvas melting. The buoyant spirit soars inescapably through it somehow. The light of the divine shines anyway through everything rendering healing unnecessary. That’s how Jesus healed; he saw the person with healing no longer needed.

Her stomach eases her spirit out over time and space and memory. She can’t find herself because she’s shifting, becoming more of everything and less of anything. She watches with the wise glistening eye of a raccoon.

Her feet curl with longing for refuge, covers, curled up night. She’s had to be brave so often lately. But she’s ashamed of this ever-present desire for sanctuary. For knowing she exists and she doesn’t. She knows safety can’t always linger beyond time and space but she still tries. She longs to find purchase with an ice skate and glide on and on with nothing else but the flow.

Ahh. The mind. Her thoughts skitter back and forth. She laughs at their propensity to steer her towards panic. When the stars align she can hear the moonbeams laughing. The hunger of all humanity for solace is a force, one she wants to understand, help with, and delineate. Somehow not be crushed by. Empaths have struggled for centuries to not be bowled over by the tidal waves of crashing human emotions when they feel each subtlety exquisitely, like the top violin string as it sings. We say yes to the subtle, gently deflect the mass cry of thundering hooves of a populace starving for verification somehow, lost and trampling others, calling out, craving, bleeding, lashing out, wanting, needing, lost. Gentle now. Gently we grip the steering wheel. Gentle now we take the curve.

Infinite muscles say infinite grace. She uncovers boundaries traversed, iron grids clenched against countless threats. Easy tiger, the soul suggests. What if we could unfurl? What if we didn’t need to carry all this stress and tension. What if, dear connective tissues, hydration flowed everywhere with fresh oxygen? What if freedom were infinite sighs along the fibers interconnecting all life?

May it be said, one day, that we are free.