Life and Time

It has started raining here again, after a long period without. We had our first storm in a while about a week or so ago, and it's raining again tonight, not hard, not too windy, but a steady sound made more pronounced by our house's copper roof. After many weeks of feeling fragile and blue, I feel better. We have pits and peaks and plain bad days, but we're all hanging in there, treating each other (mostly) with care and kindness, and as a very important and very dear friend said, describing what another wise soul told her was truly necessary in life, mostly we are moving forward together.

Meanwhile, I have friends who are lurching forward on rough waters without sound charts.

If you read me, you may read my darling Mieke, too. Mieke is the entire reason I blog. So for those of you who have (a lot of you, lately!) sent me such incredibly nice feedback about my writing, and your enjoyment of this little window into my little life, you are already connected to Miek. It's her fault that I do this, though I did almost stop when, Mieke, on her third glass of wine at our (misbegotten?) John Kerry fundraiser in 2004, outed me and my blog to about a hundred people (including Arianna Huffington, our guest of honor.) I wanted to kill her (Mieke, not Arianna.) Nobody knew I was blogging then, but luckily, most of my friends had also had too much wine, and promptly forgot. A couple, mostly people I didn't know very well, cornered me and asked for the address, and I wanted to drop silently into the ground under the cocktail tables. Since then, I've apparently become much more of a verbal exhibitionist, and I out myself, constantly. I think Mieke gets the credit for that, too. She is one of the freest, warmest and most utterly open human beings you could ever have the pleasure, or the awe, to know. She is a force of nature, and right now, she's having a tough time, and not much will make it easier, except more time. So take a minute, and send a kind thought her way. She deserves it, and right now, she needs it.

I am, for those who don't know me, one of the least "new age"-y people I know, in spite of my penchant for yoga, meditation, and images of Buddha. (I'm not a Buddhist, I practice a vaguely Hindu form of meditation but without any basis in faith, and I pretty much reject all organized religion, though I do love the ritual and the music, and being in church at Christmas time. Call me what you will.) In any case, I don't so much know what the power is of those good thoughts sent spiraling off into the ether. But I do know she deserves them, and she needs to know that she is surrounded by hundreds of people who all feel some thread of attachment to her, some kinship with her and her struggle to survive and eventually transcend a very painful path.