by Christine King

Created on: June 20, 2009

A beacon of Light when the darkness threatened my world


What started my journey on the path of discovery? It was quite simple actually. It was a very dark time in my life. I needed to find peace. I needed to find a light that could lead me from the dark. As always, I look for peace in a place quite different from most. I could never be considered conventional.

My journey for peace and self discovery actually begins in the past or rather it starts at the end. Oh bother, it begins at a grave at my grandparents' grave to be precise. My grandmother died when I was a young girl, seven years old. And even though I was so very young when she passed, my memories of her are still as vivid to me today as when I was seven. My grandfather later joined his beloved, 16 years later. Much to my heartache, see, I loved him and my grandmother very much. They were iconic to me, well, not just to me, to most of my rather large extended family.

It was a cold dreary winter day in a city just outside of Boston. I stood at the foot of their grave, lost and alone. Feeling much like the blustery New England weather, I felt cold inside, half dead, like the world around me. I needed to find peace from the storm that had become my life. The bitterness, the fear, the dark was all around me and I felt as though I was loosing my balance; about to slip into the darkness. I needed to find my center. I needed to find my balance. I needed to find peace, to quiet the noise in my brain. Clarity had only ever been found for me at one place, so that is where I went.

When I was little, I visited my grandparents every Sunday; I sometimes even got to spend the weekends with them. I loved spending time with my grandparents. I loved both of them equally, and would have rather stayed with them all the time had my parents let me. It was difficult when my grandmother passed. I was afraid I would never get to spend anytime with them again, but the visits didn't stop they just changed. Instead of going to visit my grandmother at her house, we visited her at her grave. As a child it was not uncommon to see my brothers and me running and playing in the vacant lot across from my grandmother's grave every Sunday. But as we got older, it became just my Dad and me who would go to visit her, to take care of her. It made me feel connected to her, even though she was dead. But slowly my visits too, dwindled from every Sunday to once a month, then once every couple of months. As for my grandfather,

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