perhaps it was looking at the ruins of what once was a house where i spent so many summers during my childhood, perhaps it was that i am not where i want to be now. perhaps it is that i still have to pack for the conference that i am attending for the next few days in spain, perhaps it was just a storm in a glass of water. perhaps, this is just what happens to us all some time or other. perhaps this is the engine of our ambitions stuttering through existence. perhaps this is just struggling with one character in a story that is emerging, a difficult character.
whatever it is was, it was an elixir to speak with a man whom i love, and who does not hold back his own love. this is about love. oh, yes, it is about love. many years ago i remember him struggling with that painting now hanging in berne, and i remember how we went through the house that is now ruins and how we made plans to rebuild it, to possibly work in it. i also remember how on our flight back to frankfurt he and i had a most amusing exchange about a young girl on the flight that he claimed to want a bite of.
i do not know what makes life worthwhile or what life is, but i know that being surrounded by people like this man is to experience wonder. i was feeling alone and disconnected from all, feeling like a miserable failure. he listened to my laments, i asked him to listen, i needed him to listen. when i called earlier this evening he had just left the house and his wife and partner informed me that he would be returning in a few hours and that i could call back then. i did. what a precious gift love is! why is it that i sometimes forget?
plans are a good thing, and goals are like the cardinal points in orienting my life. still today, nothing went according to plan and sometime in the middle of the afternoon i found myself in the office of my personal physician for a consultation for what i wrongly thought to be a medical emergency. it was not a medical emergency, still it is something that i need to pay attention to. a client needed to postpone a meeting, and somehow that was fine with me today. still, i did nothing of what i had wanted to do, and yet what needed to happen did happen.
i found myself discussing our need for expression, his painting, my writing... but that was not even what i needed. i needed to have a trusted and loyal friend listen to me and know that he would do absolutely nothing with it, he just listened, and we shared this life for a few blissful moments. of all those who know and love me, he is one who very early on understood my search for solitude and my struggle for expression. it also meant that when i had my thinking all muddled in my lament, he intervened and pointed out my muddling and confusion. the difference between having and being still gets me some times, it got me today.
yes... i want that painting of his on the cover of my story.
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