“When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart,
and you shall see that in truth you are weeping
for that which has been your delight.”
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
process for a while, taking shape, but stopped by one small but serious stumbling block: What to name it.
Now, that step might seem simple. But the name is the one thing you can’t change later, and it’s so key to presenting a clear and enticing invitation that can be heard amidst all the online chatter.
Plus there’s a chicken/egg thing here, where I was trying to name something that hadn’t been born yet. But so much will only be known in its unfolding, in the many micro-choices I make, how others respond, and how I respond to that. I know that I’m not the first to wrangle with this.
So that’s how I found myself stalled in the “what to name it” iterative-loop limbo, unresolved by the brainstorming and clarifying. I sighed and accepted that this blog’s creation just hadn’t crystallized yet, and put the idea once again on my back burner, that dark and overflowing place in me where so many ideas rest and ruminate and sometimes find their way out into the material world. And hopefully won’t die with me.
• • •
And then I had a loss. At the private retreat center where I go for healing and nurturing, the gracious historic century-old building was largely destroyed by fire. I was horrified, crushed, thrown off balance. Watching a guest’s footage of the building in flames was heartbreaking and surreal — even more so because I’d just been there two weeks before, staying in one of the rooms now aflame in its rafters. I knew the experience was much worse for the folks on the front lines, so I looked to honor their experience first. (Thankfully, everyone got out safely.) But still I was feeling spacey and distracted. Why was this news impacting me so much? Hadn’t I had much bigger and more personal losses? Wasn’t it just a building, after all?
