A beautiful spiritual experience by the lake

I find if there is anything the connects me most with my feelings or my sense of a higher power it is walking in and touching base with nature. Over the past week Jasper and I have not done our late morning walk to the lake but today we managed it. I had a very intense week this week with different connections and meet ups which I think triggered big feelings. On Tuesday I went back to an Al Anon meeting where I got very emotional and then I visited a friend who has just had a double knee replacement and one of the profound traumas of 2012 was when my Mum went to Sydney to have second knee replacement and nearly died from complications. She developed clotting and was cut from ankle to knee and knee to thigh. I had just had painful root canal therapy and my other sister was once again hospitalised but my niece convinced me I had to travel the 5 hours so be there and so I went and stayed in a hotel close the hospital for 5 days. Witnessing my Mum in that amount of trauma was so scary.

I was thinking today of how towards the end of her life my mother who never took much medication was constantly on pain patches, she had a number of falls and witnessing my sister’s suicide attempt the following year in April 2013 took a very huge toll. All of this I am sure was percolating under the surface as I went to visit Jane on Tuesday. I then got a call from my niece in law and sat in the chapel the hospital where my Mum died in 2017 while speaking to Laura. I came home and ate some soup and had a major spin out and yesterday was challenging as my sister’ radiotherapy started yesterday afternoon. I was lucky to be able to chat to her last night and find out a very good friend of our sister who passed away was the Bosom Buddies lady who came to take her to her appointment yesterday.

So you can imagine I was so pleased to be up showered and dressed by 9.30 am and ready to eat breakfast today and Jasper and I had the most profound gift on our walk to the lake. While I was sitting close to the lake edge reading my book and just after I walked back over the little bridge to head back to the car, two beautiful black swans swam up close to me and I knelt down close to the water’s edge keeping Jasper at a safe distance while these two swans just communed with me. As I rested there I just revelled and drank in their beauty, their heads were covered in small droplets of water and I fed them some grass from the water’s edge which they gobbled up. I get those moments of being overcome with what I could only call a sense of deep mystical grace at these kind of moments. I felt my Dad and Mum and sister Judith close to me and I had to stop by the Greek Orthodox church on the way back to the car as I was crying so hard. A friend had texted to ask me to the movies at 3 pm but I cannot go as I have therapy then.

On the walk back I thought of how when I get out walking in nature my feelings just seem to open up and flow and I think of what I heard in a 12 step meeting once that an acronym for God is : the Great Out Doors. I certainly experience that kind of mystical sense of the sacred and great benevolence in nature and those two swans really touched something so very deep in my soul today.