In the past few weeks, I’ve made special efforts to help others or otherwise go where needed. This included going to a graduation and a dance recital for the dear daughters of a friend, spending hours on the phone and in person with a friend going through some difficult transitions, playing a round of golf with the son of a friend who asked me to play with him and teach him, buying lunch for an apparently downtrodden man and just being there to listen to him and attend to his words, and supporting another close friend through a crisis. I’ve also been handing out change and snacks to people who are apparently in need as I pass them on the street. It’s hard to write about these things because I don’t want to toot my own horn here, but I do want to write about these things so I can share the impact it is having on me.
The beautiful thing is that it is touching my heart. My heart, the actual heart in my chest, feels warm and touched. There is something about “being right where I need to be” that is about the most relaxing experience I can have, and it’s a simple equation to move from “where I am needed” to “right where I need to be.” They feel like they are one and the same. Actually, it goes even one step further as I realize that the feeling becomes one of “going/being where my heart wants to be.”
I m pleased to be on the road again (a few days ago, I vacated my home for the summer to rent it to a succession of vacationers) as it brings me to a more thoughtful, reflective, and philosophical place. I had struggled very much with leaving my home and the ease, comfort, familiarity and natural beauty which I find there, but as soon as I’ve left, my openness and excitement have returned. My father taught me that the most difficult part of any sailing journey was casting off the dock lines. How true. I’ll be in the SF Bay Area for the next few days before moving on to Chicago and then on to Europe and Romania/Ukraine. For many years (since I was 15 really) I wrote regularly in journals. I did so until I have a stack of them that would easily go up to my knee or higher. I always loved the feeling of starting a new journal, since the blank pages simply bode discovery and unfoldment. Now that I write more personally on this blog, I don’t write as much in a journal (although I do travel with one) but this blog feels like a blank page at the moment, nascent with ontogeny (get your dictionary out, I needed to).