Quotes About Healing

Grief is tremendous, but love is bigger. You are grieving because you loved truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of death. Allowing this into your consciousness will not keep you from suffering, but it will help you survive the next day.

The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. It's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there, but you can do it. You're a woman who can travel that far.

I'm going to be mad at you for the rest of my life.

It's a lie you've told yourself that has flattened down whatever hurts.

Forgiveness bellows from the bottom of the canoe. There are doubts, dangers, unfathomable travesties. There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

You've made it so long without your sweet boy and now you can't take it anymore. But you can. You must.

It seemed like a long time and also it seemed like my trip had just begun, like I was only now digging into whatever it was I was out here to do. Like I was still the woman with the hole in her heart, but the hole had gotten ever so infinitesimally smaller.

One of the worst things about losing my mother at the age I did was how very much there was to regret. Small things that stung now: all the times I'd scorned her kindness by rolling my eyes or physically recoiled in response to her touch;

I'd set out to hike the trail so that I could reflect upon my life, to think about everything that had broken me and make myself whole again.

It was the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be. On

And you're wounded in the same place. That's what fathers do if they don't heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

hen you recognize that you will thrive not in spite of your losses and sorrows, but because of them, that you would not have chosen the things that happened in your life, but you are grateful for them, that you will hold the empty bowls eternally in your hands, but you also have the capacity to fill them? The word for that is healing.

Just as I'd seemed to be doing okay after my mom died. Grief doesn't have a face.

Grief is tremendous, but love is bigger. You are grieving because you loved truly . The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of death. Allowing this into your consciousness will not keep you from your suffering, but it will help you survive the next day.

It was the thing that had grown in me that I'd remember years later, when my life became unmoored by sorrow. The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

It was wrong. It was so relentlessly awful that my mother had been taken from me. I couldn't even hate her properly. I didn't get to grow up and pull away from her and bitch about her with my friends and confront her about the things I wished she'd done differently and then get older and understand that she had done the best she could and realize that what she had done was pretty damn good and take her fully back into my arms again.

Nothing did. Nothing would. Nothing could ever bring my mother back or make it okay that she was gone. Nothing would put me beside her the moment she died. It broke me up. It cut me off. It tumbled me end over end.

The thing that would make me believe that hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my way back to the person I used to be.

Every now and then I could see myself--truly see myself--and a sentence would come to me, thundering like a god into my head, and as I saw myself then in front of that tarnished mirror what came was "the woman with the hole in her heart." That was me. That was why I'd longed for a companion the night before. That was why I was here, naked in a motel, with this preposterous idea of hiking alone for three months on the PCT.

For once I didn't ache for a companion. For once the phrase a woman with a hole in her heart didn't thunder into my head. That phrase, it didn't even live for me anymore.

What if I forgave myself? I thought. What if I forgave myself even though I'd done something I shouldn't have? What

Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn, burying the evidence before hiking on.

Bagby Hot Springs.

That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I'd lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I'd done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me.