The Path

Is there a right path or a wrong path? I ask this question because someone recently told me that I am on the wrong path and it deeply disturbed me. I have been working hard to let it go, but the person who made this particular comment has been very close to me and I have gone through a great deal of change lately. All, I thought, to get on the right path. It was just one of those things that someone says and it gets under your skin like a splinter of glass. I guess I have to trust that my body/mind will eventually reject it and heal itself.

Today laughter was the best medicine. I talked over Skype with my friend who is studying at AYRI in Mysore. She is having such a great experience it is really inspiring me to try to start working toward getting to India myself. But we ended up just laughing for almost two hours. Thank heavens for some of this technology! Skype is free - I can't imagine how much a phone call like that would have cost. And it was so much better than e-mail - just to hear her voice and hear how happy she is. And things get lost in translation over e-mail a lot. Misread and misunderstood. There's no substitute for talking to a live person, unless she was actually here, or preferably I there. Anyway, it was very inspiring and fun and she was full of fun stories and she made me laugh and cry and count my blessings that I have at least one true friend in the world even if she is half a world away.

Then my husband and I traveled a couple of hours away to attend a graduation party for the daughter of one of his college friends' daughters. She's actually his step daughter, very beautiful and full of hope and promise. We got to see a lot of friends that we only see a couple times a year, but that we are very close to. They are all so easy to get along with. No hidden agendas or fragile egos that I might damage with one wrong word. Again we laughed a lot and had serious conversations about life and death and changing jobs and marriage and then laughed some more. And made plans to see each other before too long.

As we were riding home I told Tim that the afternoon had been the perfect medicine for my soul. As we drove home I read two chapters from Understanding the Mind by TNH. It was absolutely profound. Then I put it down as he recommends not reading too much at once. So I held my husband's hand and enjoyed the scenic Ohio farm and woodlands. How they blended and fell away, divided by a small river or stream. The colors of the fields, deep green, surrounded by yellow grasses and purple wildflowers. And lovely dark woods with deer on the edges tentatively coming out to eat at dusk. And I just let myself enjoy this scenery that I have seen tens, maybe hundreds of times, but it was if I was seeing it through new eyes - and I was.