I had the most divine trip down one side of the river and back up the other yesterday. I’ve see the river from both sides now from in and out and still somehow… I love this stretch of the river.

And in the center of the trip, along a rushing stream, there was a wonderful lunch with two friends. One’s a long-term friend, my mentor since seminary, who has the astonishing knack of allowing me to mentor or perhaps minister, to her. The other is her niece, a woman with whom I sense potential for friendship, but who at the very least is a charming, charming, insightful lunch companion.

So there was catching up on the life that’s happened since last we saw one another, catching up on the bits of one another’s lives about which we had no idea and oh, more than a little time, dreaming into the future.

It’s such a rush to have those conversations. Talk about our loves and losses, our passions and disappointments, our rages and our curiosity… Intense, irreverent, inane, insane, inspirational and just flat out funny. and, oh, reassuring. Lovely to know there are folks you could get up to great good with and occasionally no good at all!

It’s important to have folks you dream with and folks who call you to account for your dreams. Let us disturb the peace (peace with a small p is just status quo) so that we can make Peace (a new, exciting, just world). Let’s do it locally, and let’s do it on a grand scheme. We’ve got friends. We’ve got the world. And we have laughter. And that’s a lot!

(wow, picking words for word search. all these years of these blogs and FRIENDS has never been a choice for me? where has my brain been?)