But sometimes, when you take two ordinary things and put them together at the same time and in the same place, there’s nothing ordinary about them at all. – Charlotte’s WebI thought I was most likely the only person in my particular type of recovery while at the Casual Blogger Conference. I was surrounded by my Mormon friends, who I figured didn’t struggle with alcoholism since part of their faith requires abstinence from booze. Of course that’s a naive thing to think, and it’s not that I believe all Mormons are the same, I don’t. It’s just that in my insecurity, I assumed I was the only one completely tuned into the fact that there was no alcohol being served at the conference events. Of course, this was good for me and I’m not drinking, so why think about it? Well, because I’m an alcoholic and part of my brain is always rolling […]
I hung up the phone, cutting short a conversation that would have no end if we had our way, and sat in a happy and contented glow. I had been talking to my friend Ellie, and when I read her an excerpt from Kelly Corrigan’s book The Middle Place, I didn’t have to explain what I loved about it. She just knew, she got it, and that’s why I read it to her. I knew it would hit the same part of her heart-gut as mine. To someone else, maybe even my loving husband, the simple-but-poignant-to-me paragraph may have fallen flat. But that doesn’t happen with kindred spirits. Our souls high five at the recognition of the same things in the same way. We women do transcend, don’t we? We sit in moments together that smack of eternity and grace. We forgive each other our inevitable annoying quirks and mistakes. And as we […]
Thursday~August 13, 2009 I’ve always had amazing friends. For as long as I can remember, very faithful friends. These are the kind of friends that become family as they fluff their pillows and hang their memory pictures right here in my heart. There are a number of women in my life that came along a long time ago. They’re still here in their very own heart spaces, shaking out the dusty rugs below their memory pictures every so often. No matter what else they’re doing here, they’re mostly turning on lamps in the dark spaces and speaking a language only we know. The night before one of my friends got married, she gave me a card that said, “Tomorrow is happening largely because of you.” She wrote about how our friendship had taught her that a person can see the beautiful and the ugly, really see it, in someone else, and then that […]
