Vanilla Sky is one of my top ten movies – well worth watching if you never have. One of my favorite lines is the sidekick friend who is always telling Cruise who has the “perfect” life -- “Because without the bitter, baby the sweet ain’t as sweet….”
It is true. This is the most bittersweet time of my life. Learning to open to my pain these last years, to my shadow and dark sides, has brought an experience of joy and gratitude I never could have foreseen. The nights are hard. I miss my baby, my life, my dreams for our love. But I can’t help but acknowledge with tremendous gratitude the blessings of the Universe around me through this time. The day that Hans emailed me he was going to move out of our home, Katy was already on a plane bound for Dallas. The night I was filled with anger and prayed to the heavens to take the anger from me so I could greet him with love when he arrived in Sighisoara for our goodbye, the song I had been unable to inscribe in a book I was leaving for him came on random on my walkman. In that moment, God gathered me in his hands and melted the anger away and it has never returned. The friendship I found with Andrea, Hans’ closest friend, over these last months and her sweet loving support as I dismantled the life I had thought was forever was amazing. Uncanny universal coincidences have brought me to new friends, guides, and coworkers just as incomprehensible timing has returned me to my mother’s home, the city where my oldest daughter and her girls and my best friend live, and the business I first worked for thirty years ago at a time it needed me as much as I needed it.
Mom can’t pay me for the work I’m doing, but she does pay for the groceries and Whole Foods is just around the corner. I haven’t been able to indulge my prosciutto/parmesan addiction since Italy! Avocados and berries are great luxuries and I am thoroughly enjoying the juicer she bought for us. Between yoga and all this financed healthy eating, I’ve lost 15 pounds since I’ve been here. Now that’s a blessing!
The work is challenging but good. I am enjoying it and particularly enjoying my mom’s surprise that I am so competent. Michelle, the young lady I’ve trained in Accounts Receivable is a God-send. Cute as a button, seven months pregnant, and sharp as a tack. I don’t know what I would have done without her and have thoroughly enjoyed working with her. I’ve moved now into Accounts Payable and looking forward to my work ahead with Traci, who is a delight as well. It is good work, fighting to save and strengthen a company that seventy people depend on for their livelihood, especially in these challenging times, and it helps me understand something of what has driven my mother all these years. I treasure the ways that I’ve influenced people through my travels and writing and friendships, but I must say there is a palpable joy to tangibly affecting lives, building the business that people depend on to put food on their tables.
I’ve returned to guides of old and found new ones to help my mind, body, heart, and spirit find the growth that these upside down places in life offer. There are five yoga studios in a three mile radius and I have memberships to three of them. I am thrilled to have a studio practice again and am excitedly looking for a teaching program. There are two Starbucks just five minutes away and I can actually use those Borders coupons I get every week now! And, at last, I am writing again, much to my delight.
The bond I have found with my mother, living together again for the first time since I left home at 17 to get married, is amazing. I cherish this time and closeness with her. It is wonderful too being in the same city with my best friend of thirty years (though I can’t get her out nearly as much as I would like). Katy and my Aunt Kay are just an hour flight to the west, Patrick and April, Jill and all my Charlotte friends just two hours to the east. And with my new iphone. I can call any of them anytime I want! ;-)
The weekends have been packed. My friend from Romania, Florin, came for the weekend and we took my daughter, Erika, her husband, Nick, and their girls, Angelica and Brianna out to Six Flags. What a great day that was! Along with many tears, the weekend with Katy was also filled with smiles, getting up at the crack of dawn for the Plano Balloon Festival, a lovely lunch with my parents, and great wine and gelato! Don has been a good friend, supportive and understanding. My first weekend back from moving, he insisted on a "relaxing weekend" - riding in his plane or on the back of a Harley planes and relaxing at the beach. The tears still came but it was sure nicer crying them to the waves than the Dallas concrete! Not one trip, but two, to North Carolina for performances gave me several wonderful moments with my daughter April and her boyfriend Ben, as well as Jill and Scott. And of course nothing makes me happier than watching my boy on stage. I am so proud of him.
Yeah, the bitter is pretty bitter. The tears come less now, but they still come. The heaviness of loss still sits in my soul. But the sweet is pretty damned sweet. To be surrounded by love in the midst of pain, to know the universe and those who love you support you enough that you can break down in your own grief rather than hide it or avoid it or deny it – that’s pretty powerful stuff. To hurt this badly and feel this loved, not just by the people who love you, but by Creation itself, all at the same time is about the most amazing thing I have ever experienced. It leaves little room for fear, or regret, little room for anything but the very present experience of being alive – bitter and sweet, and beautiful….
 |
| Blessings |
Comments