When I originally had the idea for this article, it was going to be all about how life in the slow lane can be a blessing in disguise. Chronic pain and illness forces you to slow down, to measure and conserve your strength—and by necessity, to focus on what is truly important. This also gives you the opportunity to appreciate things that most people rarely notice. I see the wonder of the world each and every time I walk out the door precisely because I don’t get to walk out the door very often anymore. So there you have it: life in the slow lane can be beautiful.

Then I got hit with an extreme pain flare and had two months flat on my back to rethink that. From the last week of July on, I was largely bedridden, unable to even tilt my head to read a book or look at a TV screen. I nearly went crazy, not just from sheer boredom but from panic about all the things that weren’t getting done while I languished in agonized tedium. Even now that I’m gradually getting better, it still feels like I’m stuck in the slow lane, watching life speed by from the passenger seat of a car that’s running on fumes.

But last weekend turned out to be something of a minor miracle: the wildfire smoke cleared out unexpectedly, and I felt good enough to go out for the first time in what seemed like forever. I spent the day at my favorite farm outside town picking flowers, buying peaches to turn into cobbler, and sampling the first apple cider of the year.

A second miracle followed the next day: managing the drive to visit my in-laws in Colville, where we sat in the backyard for hours longer than I would’ve thought possible, chatting and watching quail scurry through the raspberry bushes.

That was the last day of real summer heat, and now autumn is on its way. Most of the trees are still verdant and green, but here and there shades of brilliant gold and crimson dapple the leaves, and the intermittent breeze carries with it the first hint of cold nights and the scent of ripening apples.

In a back corner of the lawn, a heap of dying flowers lies amid grass turning sere, each fading bloom plucked from the vase as it began to wilt to give the bouquet a chance to retain its ephemeral beauty as long as possible. This is the time I love most in the Pacific Northwest: the gradual descent toward winter, the dying of the year, so filled with an elegance that is at once fierce and melancholy.

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about life in the slow lane: it is a little like autumn itself, terrible and beautiful at the same time. There are times when your engine stalls and you’re stuck for so long you think you’ll never manage to get going again, and there are times when God gives you small, unexpected miracles and perfect days that are all the more precious for their rarity.

It’s the last summer flowers gracefully fading away, the leaves turning more vibrant even as they drop from the trees, the cold rain and gray skies and the days growing shorter and darker. It’s bittersweet melancholy and fierce beauty twined inextricably together, the sorrow of a life more limited than it should be and the joy of a life lived as fully as possible.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

There’s something strange that happens only on certain winter nights when the clouds hang low in the sky, catching the city lights and transforming them into a muted aurora that can be seen glowing dimly from miles away.

And it’s nights like these that Winter spills beyond the borders we expect to contain it, the ordinary magic of silent snowfalls and icicles that refract the sun into a thousand rainbow shards, into a realm of peculiar enchantments that turn every shadow into a trembling brush stroke, every dash of color into a poem in some long-forgotten language.

Nights like these, I love Winter most of all.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain

Ten years ago in Mexico, I sat beside my best friend in the backseat of a crowded van watching the mountains of Querétaro as we drove further and further away. That is when I learned that the more distant mountains become, the more they grow. They do not recede into the distance or dwindle away: first they grow, swelling to fill the horizon and tower above cities, and it is a very long time before they return to their normal proportions, even longer before they begin to shrink.

It was a trick of perspective: my best friend and I were facing backwards as we drove out of  Querétaro, and the drive was uphill so that with each mile more and more of the city fell behind, revealing more and more of the mountains it had hid. But even knowing that it was an illusion, that is how I think of Querétaro to this day: the mountains growing even as we left them behind.

That is the only time I have ever seen that happen, and yet I think it has always been true for me. I have not been to Colorado in 8 years, but I spent most of my childhood summers on vacation there visiting my father’s family and exploring Estes Park. We also occasionally vacationed elsewhere: Disneyland and Disney World, Corpus Christi–so I’ve been to the beach, Atlantic and Pacific, plus the Gulf of Mexico. I love sun and sand, swimming, sand castles, starfish and seashells and rare sand dollars.

But the beaches dwindle in my memory the more the years pass, while the mountains–they are always growing, looming larger than life across my past. The mountains are where my father came from, the things he loved, the things he taught me to love. They are the chipmunks I fed by hand in Estes Park, walking in the tundra of Pikes Peak, hiking to Glacier Lake for a picnic; the bright colors of Querétaro that seared Mexico into my heart like a brand; the first things I came to love about living in the Inland Northwest–still something of a struggle after all these years. More than anywhere else, they are my solace.

And way up north in Republic, there is a graveyard on the edge of a mountain that overlooks a valley ringed by more mountains. I first saw it months ago, at the beginning of Spring, and then again a couple of weeks ago. Those mountains are growing on me even though I am far away from them now, and I know I will have to visit them again soon, as I must always return to the places my heart recognizes as home.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Yellow Door.

Beyond the Yellow Door - Living Passionately with Chronic Pain