Where do you find your quiet place? Your shelter? Your refuge? When it all gets too much, where do you run to find peace? What motivates you, cleanses you? What heals your soul when you are feeling low? Let me know!

Nothing heals my soul quite like standing in the rain. Those days when the storm clouds overhead are so strong they swallow all the joy from the sky, only to later rain down and wash us clean in a relentless torrent. Meanwhile we glare up at the sky before continuing our commute with hunched shoulders squashed together beneath the fragile shelter of embrace that our umbrellas provide. Sometimes we should just stop and stand in the rain.

When I am standing on the cliff, and far below me the water waits, smooth as glass. My arms raised to the sky, my ears in ignorance to the squeals and screams of encouragement from my watchers below. It’s the air in my lungs, so calm before the plunge. And then I fall down, my heart frozen for a beat before my body shatters the glassy surface and I am immersed in the deep. Sometimes we should stop and breathe and then just dive.

When I can’t keep from crying and the safest place to hide is in the bath tub under the deluge. Sitting with my knees against my chin and my arms wrapped around, and the shower pours down. Rivulets becoming rivers as each hot droplet mingles with my tears, washing my hurt down the drain hole. When I cannot think anymore, and there is no rain, sometimes a shower really is the best place to get clean.

When I swim beneath the water line and my world becomes cold and blue, free and deep, and the waves crashing overhead cannot harm me. Where the lake monsters creep in the depths and all is murky and silent. This fathomless world around me, its torrents ebb and flow. Here beneath, I am suspended in space and time and the only thing which moves is my heart, and my curiosity consumes me until my lungs cry for reassurance. Sometimes we should rest beneath the waves.

When the ice cold water on my face wakes me from the clutches of my dreamland, that desert place so dry and old where all my stories are birthed from, that land of dragons and fire where we forget our selves, left alone in the dark on our beds, and we run with the sun in far away worlds. When I wake once more, it is the water which calls me back into reality and rouses me to bring that same fire into my day. Sometimes it is water that keeps us awake, and fire that keeps us daring to dream.