While Beau and I were out running an errand this morning, I stopped on a whim at a nature trail where I've roamed before with the dogs of my past. The temperature was on the 30s, no breeze to speak of, just that kind of gray, late morning in December, when the only sounds are your old rain boots squishing in the slush and your new best friend sniffing the scent of deer and fox and the paw prints and footsteps from dozens of dogs and humans who passed this way before us.

Soft cascades of wet snow randomly fell from the tree boughs overhead, wet silence falling into the hush. Here and there, someone had hung old Christmas balls on the branches, perhaps marking the path or just offering a small splash of color in the gray and brown and white landscape.

Beau wasn't on alert for anything; he was just taking it all in, scent by scent. For me? There was nothing going on - in my brain, in my heart, in my body. I was just there, as if I'd shed from myself everything intangible the minute my feet hit the path. I wasn't thinking about dog training or what I was going to have for lunch or work deadlines or any of the myriad problems keeping me up at night.

I just stood there, enveloped by the stillness in a sacred space.

Every day, we're navigating the entanglements of humans and humanity, the triumphs and the struggles, the steps behind us and the murky paths ahead, the known and the unknown of the Divine. It can sometimes be a clamoring and clanging in our souls. It can sometimes simply be too much.

In the woods, time stops and gives us a moment to catch our breath.

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