Our Lady of Perpetual Astonishment

We were hiking back to camp when it happened. I only wanted to keep going but he bade me sit down to talk it out. I had wanted to be afraid and then I wanted to cope aloud and he made me stop walking to do that. This wasn’t about our sport, this was personal to me. This was a yet different fear beyond what I’d already faced alongside him. Because we had though, I reluctantly sat down. I couldn’t look at him at first, or think, so great was the mess in my head. He waited. By and by, I talked. Around all of it. I said everything I felt like saying. I looked at the valleys close and distant, the further mountains, the wide blue sky. As I reacquainted myself with the desert calm, a shadow startled me not ten feet to my right. The raven who’d cast it swooped down in front of us, lilting on the breeze. I nearly cried then. “That’s for you,” he said, and the raven played on. With rarely a wingbeat, a wide black bird casually careening on draughts of dry, warm wind just beyond our reach from the canyon rim. The raven stayed close quite a while. Let this die now, she said to me. I left it soaring over those many valleys off toward the far mountains under our wide blue sky.