The Hidden Stones Beneath Our Lives

There is a tender rhythm that unfolds between parents and children, one that begins in closeness so intimate that breath and heartbeat seem to echo in unison. In those early years, life is woven together like threads on the same loom, each movement, each choice of the parent shaping the hidden contours of the child’s unfolding. The parent, often without words, offers an entire world: protection, shelter, nourishment, and the quiet assurance that life is worth trusting. To the child, these are not heroic deeds but simply the atmosphere of living, like air filling the lungs or water touching the skin. Only later does one realize how deep these gifts ran.

As children grow, their lives stretch outward, like rivers pressing beyond their sources, seeking their own course toward the sea. The gravity of becoming oneself pulls them forward, into places where they no longer walk beside their parents but rather on paths forged by their own steps. It is a necessary unfolding, though it often feels to parents like a gentle ache—a loosening of the hands that once steadied, a letting go not chosen but given. For in order for children to live fully, they must discover horizons unseen by their parents, must carry their own questions into lands yet unnamed.

In this movement outward, there is often a forgetting. The hours that once seemed to define childhood—the small rituals of bedtime, the meals shared, the countless invisible sacrifices—fade like mist when new achievements arise. A first job, a new city, a relationship, a child of one’s own: these moments command attention, and they shape identity in fresh ways. The past begins to feel distant, as though buried beneath the urgency of the present. Parents recede into the background, not because love has lessened, but because the tempo of growth requires new stages to take center place.

And yet, with time, there comes a reckoning. For in the maturity of later years, children begin to see with different eyes. They sense that every accomplishment they stand upon was not created in isolation, but rests upon a hidden foundation. Behind the degrees earned, the homes built, the lives constructed, there are earlier stories—quiet, unseen, often unspoken—that made such things possible. The sacrifices of parents, the resilience of their struggles, the hopes they carried like secret prayers—all these form the deep stones of a life, laid down beneath the flowing waters of their children’s becoming.

It is then, often when parents have grown older or gone from this world, that the profound truth settles with full weight: one’s own life is not a solitary achievement but a continuation. It is built stone upon stone, generation upon generation, each story supporting the next. The lives of mothers and fathers are not erased by time but transformed, becoming the invisible architecture upon which children build their own dwellings of meaning.

This recognition calls forth a gentleness, a reverence. To see one’s parents not only as guardians of childhood but as human beings with their own dreams, wounds, and sacrifices, is to glimpse the larger tapestry into which one’s own life is woven. Their silent endurance, their unnoticed tenderness, their struggles borne without complaint—these are the submerged stones that hold the weight of the river above. One begins to realize that the present, vibrant as it may be, is carried by currents that began long before one’s own first breath.

And perhaps this awareness awakens a new gratitude. For gratitude is not merely a polite word or a seasonal ritual; it is a posture of the heart that bows before the hidden scaffolding of one’s life. To give thanks for the hands that once steadied, for the voices that once encouraged, for the presence that once accompanied us in our most fragile beginnings, is to recognize that no life is ever truly solitary. Even in independence, we are never free from the quiet shelter of those who came before us.

In the end, children may move away, their lives scattering like seeds across landscapes unknown to their parents. But the seed always carries within it the mystery of the soil from which it grew. Beneath all the striving, beneath all the stories told and retold, lies the ancient foundation: the lives of those who gave us our first shelter, whose stories now live within us, even when unspoken. When we finally see this, we do not lose our independence; rather, we gain a deeper belonging—to those who came before, to those who will come after, and to the great river of life that carries us all.

All my Love and Light,
An