Forsyth Park, 6 AM, and the Weight That Left

I had been carrying something heavy for about two years. That is the only way I want to describe it here because the specifics are mine and they are not the point. The point is that by last October I was exhausted in a way that sleep did not fix, and I had started waking up in the early morning hours and not being able to go back down, and I would lie there cataloging everything wrong with my life in the dark. I was in Savannah for work, staying at a hotel a few blocks from Forsyth Park. I woke up at 5:30 and could not go back to sleep and finally I gave up and got dressed and walked to the park because I needed air and I needed to be somewhere that was not the ceiling of a hotel room. The park was almost empty. A man was running on the outer path. A woman was sitting on a bench reading something. The fountain was running. I walked to the center of the park, near the fountain, and I sat down on the grass even though the grass was damp. I was not praying. I do not have a strong practice. I was just sitting. What happened is hard to put in a sequence because it did not feel like a sequence. It felt like something that was already true became visible to me. I became aware, sitting there, that I was held. Not physically. But held in the way that you are held when someone who loves you completely is paying attention to you. It was vast. It was not sentimental. It did not make any promises about the specific things I was worried about. But it was so fundamentally okay, and I was so fundamentally known and not judged, that I started crying in the middle of Forsyth Park at 6 in the morning while a stranger ran laps nearby. The weight did not disappear that morning. Some of it is still here. But something shifted. Something I was gripping loosened. I flew home two days later and things were not fixed but I was different in how I was holding them, and I have stayed different. I came back to Savannah three months later just to walk back to that spot. Nothing happened the second time. I did not need it to.