In summer of 2017 my family spent six days walking in rural Wales. And still, if someone asks about my ideal day, that’s what I have to offer them. The steep green hills, the wandering fence lines, the ferns, the mud, the miles, the sky, the sheep, the occasional markers to guide your way, everything you need strapped to your back. And then, as the summer day wanes, a hot bath, a pub supper, and a soft bed. In the morning you wake up and do it all again. It’s very simple.

At the end of that trip, when I wrote about it, I described a sheep carcass “with a monarch butterfly fluttering in and out of its ribs. My mom said there was a poem in that, and I agreed with her, but I couldn’t think what it would be.”

I suspect I have found that poem, nearly a decade later. I’ve been thinking in recent weeks and months more about that trip—not so much how to get back to it (though I’d be very happy to do something like it again) but how to bring its magic forward into my day-to-day life as it already exists. How to treat each day as a series of steps up a hill, carrying only the burdens necessary for the time being, with a promised rest at the end. And when some decomposing being which has shuffled off this mortal coil settles into my line of sight—some failure, pain, or uncertainty which is unasked-for, but part of the natural order of human existence—I want to see too the sharp silhouette of hope dancing amidst its bones.

Recently, I’ve found it a visceral struggle to love well, to find my footing, to pick out the guideposts that will keep me on the path. I am comforted, at the moment, by examples of shortcomings redeemed and made new, by grace so obviously divine that it does not compute: the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” given a vision of Love to speak to the Misfit right in her final moments, and the vineyard laborers in the gospel of Matthew who receive the full wage despite only a little work.

So then, walking in this way, each day is beauty and effort and cloudy vistas and promises that flutter even within the ribs of death. And each night is restoring rest—with an open door, a bed made up, a light left on, someone waiting to welcome you home.