Friends

Tonight my friend Sara is driving in from Wilmington, NC for the weekend.  Tomorrow morning Faye will drive here from Hendersonville, NC and the three of us will have a retreat here as we do three or four times each year.  We are three of our six pod sisters who met in 2005 as students in the Claritas Institute for Interspiritual Mentoring which Joan Borysenko initiated  and led.  It was a turning point in the spiritual life of each of us.  And, it melded us together into a pod of truly loving friends for life!  (The other 3 are involved with stuff this weekend that prevents them from being here.)  ….It's times like this when I wish I were a poet.  Friends have become so important to me - relationships is what life is truly all about.  Although I love my isolation times, they would be worthless, worse than that, useless at best, heartbreaking more likely.  The isolation periods give me the time to process what is going on in my life and grasp the deepest meaning of it all.  At the moment, FRIENDS.  Otherwise, they just disappear from my screen.  …..This act of learning as a shaman to "dance between the visible and invisible worlds" is clearly the most important facet of my life now, the most rewarding, and perhaps the most difficult.  But, it is coming.  I am almost daily now seeing improvement, progress, and joy in the acts of attention to the game.   I am so fortunate to be able to share my new learnings this weekend with friends who care.