It can be hard to know when you have it good. But so many have it much harder, their grip on gravity tenuous at best. Lean against each other with hope, lend your hand to keep the planet from drifting off course. Chances are you’ll make a friend in the bargain! And who doesn’t need more friends!
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?)
When you’re in the depths of winter, you think about Spring and you think you know what it means. (Substitute any seasons here. I think longing clouds your vision.) I know I don’t remember the allergens (achoo!), but I don’t think you remember Spring’s long and sustained beauty. There are too many wonderful flowers blooming, too many trees bursting with color; the scent of all the unfolding dances on the breeze — oh right the breezes and the gales.
There’s a rail trail in our area and a girlfriend and I strolled down it at dusk, talking about life and its challenges. It’s hard to decide whether the setting was simply antithetical to our conversation or a balm! Life is very hard and life is very beautiful. There we were, all in one splash. The trail cuts through people’s back yards, farmers fields and wooded copses. It does that all in rapid succession, lest you think i walked for miles and miles and miles. Violets, bulbs, trees, new plantings, birds and barking dogs soothed conversations of loss and challenging presents and subsequent futures.
As we were walking for clarity and health, the earth was offering Beauty. Maybe the conundrum of Spring that I was poking at earlier is that it is so ephemeral and short-lived, in such an exuberant and sustained way. That’s good to remember when life is confusing. Peace comes in many guises, doesn’t it, and it keeps opening new ways to walk. Filled up with beauty and gratitude and searching for Peace in the midst of the chaos. We’ll make it the weather and the rest of us… Our lives depend on it.
