....connecting

I was feeling a little empty today.  

I'm a hermit and I usually enjoy being alone...

but today, I wanted to be distracted,

so I called a friend to see if she could come out and play...

she said she had friends coming up to hike along the river and I could join them...

I'm not good at small talk...not at all.  

So when I found myself alone with the friend,

of a friend, the silence wasn't the comfortable kind.  

After about 5 min. with no words passing between us since we'd already covered 

the mandatory discussion about the mess the world seems to be in...

I put down the stick I was so busily removing the bark from and looked in his eye and smiled. 

He looked in my eyes and blurted out that he was in CA. to clean out his son's apartment.  

That his son had taken his own life.  

No small talk here.  The ground shifted a little beneath me, 

I looked into this man's eyes while he talked about his loss....

his struggle to take in the fact that his beautiful young son didn't want to live in this world.  

He showed me a photo. 

His son who wanted to be a sports doctor smiled out at us. 

He expressed his deep grief that his son had not talked to him,

how maybe if he had something could have been done to stop him.  

He spoke of his guilt at not knowing that his son was in such deep pain. 

My eyes never left his.

I talked about my mothers death

and how she sometimes comes to me in dreams

and how I can often smell her perfume. 

I talked about the twins and how they were only here on this plane for a month

but had had such a big impact on all of us who knew them,

loved them.  

He wondered how he would ever fill the space his son had left..

how he didn't feel that emptiness yet,

but knew it was coming, 

and he feared it would break his heart.  

We talked about this world we live in, 

this journey, how it might all be an illusion but how the feelings are very real.  

We talked about how to disconnect, unplug from the dream.  

We talked about Oneness. 

Connection.  

And when it was time to say good bye we hugged and he whispered, 

 ''thank you for being so present...''

and I thanked him for being such a gift. 

We had been two strangers who connected.  

We had seen each other. 

I looked in his eyes a last time and remembered something 

I read long ago about how if we truly, truly, look into another's eyes

we can't help but see their soul, and experience unconditional love.

When we parted my heart felt bigger, softer,

even though the topic was death,

I felt a deep joy at being given the opportunity to listen deeply

to a fellow traveler, and have him listen deeply to me..

Soul friendship is a way of kindness, of mercy, of mutual vulnerability. A soul friendship is marked by a kind of deeply respectful intimacy and familiarity that our society has all but forgotten....unknown