Step by Step

I have a hard time looking for the answers to questions of life that I'd rather live and discover answers to than have it all figured out. That doesn't keep me from asking the questions that come back even when I thought I had the answer. The practice of being incorporates all that changes and develops across a lifetime. It is here that brings presence to a stillness while change constantly brings me to surprises that delight and surprises that make me concerned. The long term view that opens my eyes to the past and opens my soul to the future give me a chance to explore what this present can be.

Sharing this life, one that is a dance with the changing seasons and folk of all kind brings me to realize how much stay the same over the years. It is this sameness that brings out the goodness that is still full and rich in the midst of rain clouds and stormy tumult. To offer or receive a hand in the midst of uncertainty is to walk the world in greater harmony. When realizing our wealth of experiences are worlds to bring together, we find that even our differences are what we have in common.

For me, friendship has been a source of connection as well as collaboration. It can form a bridge that connects two souls or it can bring together ways of living that enhance the art of each person's experience. For friends to grow close, there often has to be an experience that each person recognized as a place where deepening and opening could occur. It is the opening of life that is like a new day, a flower unfolding its petals, a collaboration in creating a sports victory or a song, that embraces the other, that takes life in its grasp and lets go so that it can hold another hand, touch another soul, and sing a song for the times of sharing. The path of a friendship is the chance to be one's self and become one with their life as they live and laugh in the way of love for another.

Sunshine

The sun shines all over this planet leaving energy for plants to grow and light to illuminate our lives. For an emergence of sunshine is a creative force, cast on the snow and reflected in a glistening light and as rays like fingers reach through the clouds to the terrain of the Earth. It finds its opening in the crags and fissures along the surface of life as a guiding beacon into understanding warmth.

Our eyes open to the first light and close when our body calls upon us for a time of rest and renewal. As the sunshine bursts across the scenes of our lives there is the space to discover what is here in our lives, what is deepened and expanded in every moment. In recent days, I have felt the sunshine of new opportunities in the lives of friends who have danced into the dawn. I feel the gaiety of all we gather in the stories of our days. The stories that begin to glow with the happiness that surprises us as sunshine glows from the places that were once dark.

This is the sharing of sunshine. A dance with a dear friend, a smile with a new one, an understanding nod in an empathetic ear. As we illuminate life with the truth of who we are, we can bear the anxieties and fears that carry our hearts into realms of deepest need. As we hear how we're not alone, as we gather ourselves to trust life at its core, we can begin to soar together.

           

Barefoot Friendships

There's nothing like being barefoot in a friendship. While barefooted, or fully present in the moment you're with a friend, your spirit can connect to the depths of the channels you both have experienced in a rush of storytelling and understanding. It can be like experiencing two lives simultaneously while the empathy of your experience brings you closer together.

Friendship, to me, is a story of life forming from its rawest elements: emotion, humor, questions, hopes, wonders, fears, loves. It changes our outlook on life and enriches it with an understanding that nothing is perfect in an idyllic way. It has to be perfect in our own way, that is to say it has the potential to be perfect in the path of understanding a coming together after communicating the centers of our lives, no matter what place they are in.

As in a spirit of camaraderie, therein lies the knowing of not knowing. Life has a way of surprising us, moving us into scary places where our hearts are tense with feeling and rent with disappointment. Together in friendship, our lives form where emptiness tries to pull us apart. Solitude brings us new perspective. Maybe there will be a way through this misunderstanding that allowed me to accept the complex truth of mutual realities. Maybe I can laugh and know the intimate places of my soul because a friend brought me there and loved me there.

To trust is to nurture the freedom of communicated experience with each other. Then we can be barefoot, present, and alive. Alive to really uncover what we knew we could be had we only released the moment we thought we knew how it would all work out.

Hope When It Is Dark

"Why does it take catastrophe to start a revolution?"  - Jonathan Larson

As I write this post winds and rain chase the landscape into a tumultuous flurry of hurricane and storm along the eastern coast of the United States. The potential and expected damage created is a source of uneasiness and uncertainty that strike at different moments in our lives. There can be wonder and curiosity in the midst of great suffering and loss. Devastating emotions or events can remind us about what we hold dear to our hearts, or challenge us to think about what is most important. They can shred our stability and hope into worry and fear, panic and anxiety that make us wonder how we'll ever get through.

How can this suffering be beautiful? Tears fall across our faces and our hearts continue beating with emotion that is fully raw and fully alive. How can this be beautiful if we are left alone? Where is the goodness in life when we are shackled with grief and the seeming never ending presence of calamity? Even as the storm comes and with it, expectation of and then the physical reality of damage we can find hope from the disaster. Some storms come with less warning and then change the course of the lives affected. Still how can any of this create hope, instill love, become strength, or be something positive?

We often light candles after the power goes out and it gets dark. The shining beams come through places of destruction and despair to offer hope and a way through the darkness. The candlelight we illuminate inside provides more than a symbol of promise; it creates a way to see what storms have done, and what can be done together when we share our own lights, our own stories of reality. The light we have may sometimes flicker, but if we trust it with those close to us we will not be alone. We will begin to trust again and stand together as we prepare what has been lost to grow new beginnings and new memories as we all are strengthened by togetherness.

Painful realities are hard to bear especially as suffering seems to grow and affect multitudes where communities fall apart and homes are ravaged. We often question whether or not we should stand strong and work to overcome when afflictions may appear to come more and more often. The candle we lit may go out, we may lose our voice, our heart may become overwhelmed and life may change with tragedy and wrongdoing.

Disaster may strike, but if we light the hope and the way or find someone that has already done so, we can stand together in friendship as our candles can warm the lives of those around us, as our candles light our hearts so we may feel ourselves giving and receiving in the unity that comes out of brokenness. It is then we can remember the continued strength that is found when we trust ourselves enough to rebuild and grow stronger from the scars and the pain that we faced in understanding that pain will always affect humanity. This is how the night ends while hope and love become the new light of dawn. With a song that comes from one heart that reaches our souls and becomes a chorus of light and hope from the soul as we empower one another in times of human need.

E Pluribus Unum - Out of Many, One

Sometimes I look at the lives around me in the depths of reality today, the depths that come from the places I walk, I hear something quieter than the breeze. I hear a heartbeat that beats on a day that takes its place in a string of years and seasons that have created me to help shape the experience of today. I see the inspiration that struck wonder as it filled my eyes as a child and feel the shiver of joy that life is greater than my own experience. It sometimes shapes the spirit of the experience of a team, a country, a family, a friendship, that together we are one, and together we can be alive and make the future out of this. A future that can be harmonious if we dream and act together, if we hear the heartbeat of our neighbors and trust them to hear our own.

The trust and vulnerability in connection from community to friendship is fragile, yet precious as we feel or begin to sense the togetherness that helps us feel our embrace. It is difficult to know this depth even imagine when we have often known fear, despair, loneliness that has been bred from disappointment, discouragement, and exclusion. We know that exposure may take us further down the road of pain that we've known. So how can my life and your touch a life where we may see the hint of a smile? How can we build community and friendships when we have only been disappointed?

I think hope and heart can be grown from vision and feeling. Feeling that life isn't always the sunshine of smiles and laughter, but sometimes the numbness of past trauma haunting our present. Sometimes it is the continuous rainfall that floods our feelings and overwhelms us with discouragement and washes out the work we have done together. When a tragedy caused by human hands shatters our community, does it fracture everyone irreparably, or does it give birth to healing?
Healing that creates a scar to help us remember what we have gained, what we have grown, and taught by one life who's ripples still touch our lives as the memory of a life is carried always. We can sing and hold those close to us, and even those we have just met, to continue to build on memory and what we have.

These are the roots that can hold the soil where we grow together. Roots are the friendship and connection where we grow. Tears of remembrances and sunshine of continued hope and an embrace grow and help enrich the community that has blossomed from shared memory. Fear is real, but hope is true, where we hear the voices we have together. Voices from the soul that we feel growing from scars and wounds, and also from new beginnings, from forgiveness and from our lives shared with friends. There, barefoot, we can feel and hear the melody with the rhythm of our heartbeat join in community. The spirit of unity begins with one heart, one friendship that is shared over a lifetime, and one collective experience of unique perspectives and beginnings that are always the continuation of our growth.