I know these feet. I know this ground.

The wave that had come was no longer my concern, the only concern I had was where my feet were. In a micro-moment of holding, I’d undone.

I recognized the mixture of snow and ice under my boots. Boots I’d worn for years. Boots that have taken me miles upon miles through snow. I’d worn these boots walking to meet a friend for breakfast in the dead of winter one day. I’d worn them on trails of snow, on a covered bridge. I’d worn them walking my mountain dog while she chased falling flakes, on the whitest of winter days.

“I know these feet. I know this ground,” I thought as my gaze shifted from the trunk of my car where I’d been standing for just a second when the grief hit. “I know this ground. I know this sound, I know this driveway,” I could hear my mind say as I dropped into my body to be in the very presence of the wave. The wave didn’t take me. I was a pillar in that moment, standing, very still, with an alertness that I could only describe as keen awareness. The cold, the crunch, the color of the icy mix over the night blacktop, the crumbs of salt I’d spread hours earlier. I was dialed in. And I was breathing. And it was familiar. I was transposed into a time and space that felt, connected to every space of my being and also boundless at the same time. An unfolding. Fearless and certain and connected.

The wave had come. The wave of emotion, this time hurt, had come. I know enough to know what it is, the depth of it, how far back it goes, how dark it is. The waves are going to come, this I know. They always do. But it hadn’t taken me with it in that moment. I felt it as I’d stepped out of my car but from the seconds that existed from the driver’s seat to the trunk, something had shifted and I went in. Into the space I was standing in, into a deeply present, deeply personal space of feeling connected to nothing but what was happening in that very moment. All of my senses, acutely attuned.

I read later that night about the release of all things. In the book _A Course in Miracles, _”Miracles represent freedom from fear. ‘Atoning’ means ‘undoing.’ The undoing of fear is an essential part of the Atonement value of miracles” (p. 5). It had been undone. I had felt it.

The wave that had come was no longer my concern, the only concern I had was where my feet were. In a micro-moment of holding, I’d undone.