Consolations that count

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. 

Max Ehrmann 1927

You have to slow right down to basic everyday activity and being to identify and appreciate them.
The way we seize each new day, no matter how mundane, can be an opportunity to find consolation, if we depart from our repetitive routines and pause our quiet desperation.
Whether it is striding across fallow wintry fields or walking beside a raging river, 
I am always in search of some form of consolation, just as Vincent Van Gogh might have done, by ‘reconsidering sunflowers‘.
I notice that today’s sunrise is going to be extraordinary, already the sky is streaked with red and pink hues that stretch across it, the frozen leaves crunch beneath my feet as I walk along a disused railway track long since returned to nature.
There is a certain consolation too in just the solitude itself, when walking along a deserted sea shore as the waves endlessly lap it,
or through a dense wood where shafts of sunlight still penetrate and reach its floor.
It is the consolation of peace and equilibrium that can be acquired and a unison with nature emerge, that can provide a restorative perspective of our world and our transient place in it.
There is also the consolation of sleep. That nightly repose, the antidote to disquiet, the refuge from our fears and ills. 
The balm of sleep that soothes us and transports us to another place where we
might rather be.
It is these small mercies that should be thankfully received, as they help to dispel some of the darkness that can envelop us.

RAK 1/23