Where the Lost Wander

by Amy Harmon

“The pain. It’s worth it. The more you love, the more it hurts. But it’s worth it. It’s the only thing that is.”

I’m convinced everyone is a little vile, if they are honest about it. Vile and scared and human.

Hating never fixed anything. It seems simple, but most things are. We just complicate them. We spend our lives complicating what we would do better to accept. Because in acceptance, we put our energies into transcendence.”

“Put your energy into rising above the things you can’t change, Naomi. Keep your mind right. And everything will work out for the best.”

That’s what hope feels like: the best air you’ve ever breathed after the worst fall you’ve ever taken. It hurts.

“The hardest thing about life is knowing what matters and what doesn’t,” Winifred muses. “If nothing matters, then there’s no point. If everything matters, there’s no purpose. The trick is to find firm ground between the two ways of being.”

“Maybe we are all stretched across the banks,” he says, thoughtful. “Living in the land of yesterday and the land of tomorrow.”

Are you angry with the bird because he can fly, or angry with the horse for her beauty, or angry with the bear because he has fearsome teeth and claws? Because he’s bigger than you are? Stronger too? Destroying all the things you hate won’t change any of that. You still won’t be a bear or a bird or a horse. Hating men won’t make you a man. Hating your womb or your breasts or your own weakness won’t make those things go away. Hating never fixed anything.

Footprints, too small to be a man’s, too large to be a child’s, sit on the surface of the snow. Beside the footprints, the toes clearly delineated, is a small set of paw prints, scampering away toward the trees. A woman and a wolf. I follow them, bemused, until they suddenly disappear. “The mother came for her son,” Lost Woman says.

I realize now that life is just a continual parting of the ways, some more painful than others.