Just for a moment, let's be still.

perhaps in these few days of silence and stillness, as the dust settles, as the haze lifts, you can feel your feet on the ground and be exactly where you are. there is no need to rush, to run. your only destination is here and now and in your body and with your own beating heart. perhaps this is the greatest work to be done, the holy work of presence.

- from dearwomanmovement, Instagram

As a I packed my bag on the last night of my holiday visit with my sister’s family, I heard a quiet cry coming from the room where my twin five year old niece and nephew were supposed to be sleeping. My niece was crying, a sight that quickly overwhelmed me with my own emotions. She tearfully told me that she was trying to sleep, but couldn’t. I felt her confused frustration like it was my own. I asked her if it would help if I laid down with her until she was able to sleep, and through her sniffles she nodded yes.

So the three of us - my niece, her sleeping twin brother, and me, lay side by side. In the quiet, I matched my breathing to hers, and in that moment, nothing else mattered, nothing else existed. My role was as comforter, a silent guide through the confusion that proceeds the early stages of sleep. She eventually drifted off, and I left her to her dreams.

There is something to that moment of in-between, that gray blue feeling that separates the fulfillment of the day and the promise of a dream filled night. It’s almost a magic, when you can find it and recognize it for what it is - a moment of pure unfiltered stillness, when your emotions and intentions are at their most pure. My niece gave me that gift, a moment in which it didn’t matter what I needed, or the plans I made to prepare for the 8 hour drive I was facing the next morning, the path of interstates that I would take to save time and daylight; the laundry I would need to do when I returned, the chores and work that waited for me when I returned home. All that mattered was the peace that my heart could give in that moment.