{For the month of December I’m participating in #reverb10 – an online initiative that prompts people to reflect on the past year and look towards the new one.}
December 3 – Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). (Author: Ali Edwards)
Phew, this is a hard one. The moment that comes to mind is one I mentioned in the post yesterday – the death of an itty bitty family member. I won’t go too far into this and will skip the detail of texture, smells, voices, noises, colors (you know, protecting the privacy of family members and whatnot and also because I’m a weenie and going into all of that is more than I care to bear right now), but I will say that in that moment of loss, I felt so alive. There’s the obvious reason for this, the clear division between life and death when in the moment of passing. But there’s also the emotions associated with death – sadness, fear, frustration, injustice – that harken to your own aliveness and can’t be denied. For me, there’s always been something so visceral about sadness, more so than happiness, that makes me so aware of myself, that I’m alive and what it means to be alive. The fact that this was also a shared experience with some of my all-time favorite people bonded us in way that will never be forgotten. We witnessed death, we held each other, we were faced with our own aliveness whether we wanted to be or not. To say it was profound is a huge understatement.