Inspirations: Archives

Our best friends remind us of the right stuff. They feed us soul food. They hold our hand when we cross risky roads. They’ve got our back. Crossing between an old life/old friends and new life/new found amis, I am constantly reminded how lucky we are in our vast array of friendships, how profoundly important they are to us, and how wonderfully weird and iconoclastic they grow. One of the old friends fed me a particularly stunning bite of soul food recently. She is a beautiful woman. She is smart, generous, talented. That said, she struggles with the nature of intimate, committed relationships, as do most. In some lives it is costlier. She recently broke up with a man she had deeply loved and been with for several years. She had every reason to be broken, resentful, thrashed. Instead, she’s arrived at a farther shore. “You know,” she said, “I could be sad and of course depressed, or angry. I go through all that, and more. But these days I’m listening to another voice. I believe it is my soul, which says, ‘I’m really grateful we loved each other. His personality and ego couldn’t love me in the way I needed, but his soul loved me enough to suffer through all we created together, and the tortured breakup. We did torture each other in our happiness, and our pain. I’ve concluded that it takes a really soulful, loving Self to agree to take on those depths with someone else, doing it for their own growth, and the other’s. Today, I’m working on letting everything else go but that. Of course I struggle with regrets on having ‘made a mistake’ once again. Yes, I lay in sleepless depression some nights. But my soul voice is growing stronger as I Practice listening… Read more »