Feel.

"I feel it all. I feel it all. The wings are wide. The wings are wide. Wild card inside..." -Feist

There are days when I wish I was the girl that under-identifies with everything instead of the opposite. I wish I was able to look at the world with detachment, with a clear and conscious choice to merely observe.

A man is having a typical and boring Saturday morning with his wife. He washes the dishes and discusses the pending weekend plans, or maybe he is just cracking the local paper open. His wife complains that he hadn't laid the salt out on the drive like he said he would. Their son plays "Guitar hero" on his Wii upstairs while IMing his pals about tonight's party. Very normal, very "everyday".

In an instant... faster than a plate can drop, it happens. Faster than paper can gently float feather-like, swaying side to side to the floor, it changes. Faster than a son can make it down the stairs... a heart can stop. They do every day.

I see it. I hear it. I feel it. The quiet panic of adrenaline holding them together. The molding and reshaping of their lives being changed as it happens. I can sense the echo of such a shock, the type of energy that flies through air, permeates through boundaries and protective walls.

I know not how it ended. The paramedics, the lights, the snow....all of it surreal. I feel it all. My own fear of their future takes over. The holiday, the emptiness, the imminent hole left behind in the space once occupied. Knowing a Dad might not be there to watch a graduation, an 18th birthday, a 20th anniversary. It happens everyday.

It is reality and life at its most fragile....In the balance. Moments like it cause a realignment, a pause of love and reckoning. A moment of connection to a family either briefly scared or broken. A family, at the very least: feeling.

If there is any power in true hope for a stranger. I offer it today. All day. In silent revelry of the gift we live every day:

Feeling alive.