First Rights
My brain fog had barely lifted as we drove into the mountains of New Mexico. The majesty of the Sangre de Cristo reached out to touch the raw places of my soul, and I breathed deeply of the aspen-filled air.
Barely six months after the final divorce papers were signed, I escaped with my siblings for a week to the small mountain town of Red River, New Mexico. Nestled in a verdant valley, I felt safe in its womb of pine cones, deer that walked through town and the absence of any type of urban sprawl. No McDonald’s. No Quik Trip. Just the peace of the mountains and the opportunity to start over single.
After we settled into our cabin, I carried my journal outside, marveling that I needed my jacket in the latter part of July. Back home in Kansas, I would have sweated through another 90 percent humidity day, but in the enchanted mountains of New Mexico, the air remained cool and clear.
I felt as if I could finally breathe. Propping my journal onto a picnic table, I recorded the sights and sounds that I knew would lead to soul healing: the babbling of the river as it carried trout to the nearby lake, the buzz of a hummingbird as it fought intruders battling for fresh sugar water, pink columbine and wild daisies weaving together near the cabin’s entrance, the afternoon rain cloud that played peekaboo over the tips of the treeline.
This was the fifteenth year our family vacationed in Red River yet it was my first year as a single mom. My grown son stayed home to work, and secretly I was glad. I needed alone time to reflect on my new identity and try to discern what life now held for me.
Still a bit shell-shocked from my battered emotions, I determined not to dwell on lawyer’s fees, the necessary sale of the divorce house or my fears of what the future might hold. I would instead focus on what I could be grateful for and fill my journal with helpful words rather than pain.
So I recorded my gratitude for siblings who realized I needed time with my journal, for a new pen to write out my thoughts, for the lessons about independence I was learning after twenty-five years of marriage. I watched the ink form around my doodles as I wrote thank you’s for the silence of the mountains. No traffic or blaring horns. An occasional laugh from a neighboring cabin – the sound of joy that gladdened my heart.
I listed new goals for this infant stage of life: to work on a new book and seek a publisher, to refuse any seeds of bitterness or shades of false guilt, to hug my son every day and remind him he was dearly loved. My determination to save more money, to pay off debts, to possibly buy another house some day spurred me on to challenge myself toward positivity. I would need to work two jobs, but I still had my health and I would somehow find the energy.
In fact, within the verdure of those mountains, I felt invincible. Where heat and struggle had depleted my inner resources, this location instilled a boldness to move beyond the battle and jump toward the finish line. I would find my strength again. I would conquer fears, doubts and the unknown risks that lay ahead. Somehow I would find the fortitude to believe in myself again and force behind me the failures of the past.
Throughout that blessed week, I often returned to that same table with my journal. Admittedly, sometimes I did record some of the pain, then cried over it and inked through it. It felt good to cross out the negatives and beside them write something good. Instead of despair, I sought hope. Refusing bitterness, I began to forgive.
Through the writing and the breathing in of mountain air, I felt younger and alive again. I knew challenges waited for me back in Kansas, but for those seven days in New Mexico, I once again believed that I would not only survive – but indeed – I would thrive.
I felt stronger than I had in months, grateful for the opportunity to come away from the pain and dwell on creating words within the beauty of God’s mountain creation. Within the focus on gratitude, in that precious place of serenity, the raw places inside healed over and the scars became a topography of hope.
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