Gratitude and Aching at the Same Time — Both Are Allowed
I was Low-Key Obsessed with picking Black Berries everyday.
Here are some highlights of our Germany trip.
We had just come from Pittsburgh where it was connection after connection, eighteen of us at Deep Creek, family everywhere, so much love and noise and laughter, and Germany was a completely different kind of experience. Quiet walks in the forest behind Olaf's house, early fall weather that I never get living in Maui, sitting with his mother who is one of the most soft and beautiful human beings I know and who just turned eighty. My nervous system went from overwhelm to underwhelm. and it took some time to adjust.
And something else was happening underneath all of it that I want to share because I think you'll recognize it. I was in the middle of so much beauty and so much love and so much that I was genuinely grateful for, and there was also this ache. A homesickness that had been building after three months away from Maui, just this quiet longing to be somewhere else even while I was fully appreciating something wonderful.
I kept noticing how many things can be happening in us at the same time. Gratitude and aching, fullness and longing, connection and a deep desire for home, and none of those things cancel each other out. I think we make ourselves wrong for that, like we should just be happy because look at everything we have. But when I stopped trying to sort out which feeling was the right one and just let them all be there, something relaxed.
The ache didn't go away but it stopped feeling like a problem.
That's what I keep coming back to from this whole summer. How multilayered we are as human beings and how much more of life we get to experience when we stop making ourselves wrong for all of it.
