today, part 8 [one year later].
Today hasn’t been as bad as I expected. Thought I write that pretty tentatively; there’s a whole lot of day left. But I was expecting to wake up pretty emotional. Instead, I woke up with gratitude in my heart. Gratitude for a peaceful night’s rest. Gratitude for waking up later than usual. Gratitude that today is a marker, a stone of remembrance for me. But for the first time, that stone of remembrance isn’t in a place. It’s not sitting on soil where I thought it always would be. It’s not traveling light, looking for another place to land. It’s in someone’s hands. Not mine. One year ago, I sat in the Oslo airport and read psalm 68. I sat by a window near the plane, watching and waiting for us to leave. This plane would take me back to American soil. I think I felt pretty similar then, to how I feel today— “My heart is full of emotions, most that I cannot name or fully understand right now. All that I feel isolated by, totally unknown beneath them, beneath their avala...