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I am proud of my friend. When I describe her to other people, I often use my hands and show about 3″ between my pointer finger and thumb. “She is that big,” and I laugh. I don’t mean it disrespectfully, quite the opposite. My friend is petite and about 12 inches shorter than me.
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“There is a kind of sadness that comes from knowing too much, from seeing the world as it truly is. It is the sadness of understanding that life is not a grand adventure, but a series of small, insignificant moments, that love is not a fairy tale, but a fragile, fleeting emotion, that happiness is not a permanent state, but a rare, fleeting glimpse of something we can never hold onto. And in that understanding, there is a profound loneliness, a sense of being cut off from the world, from other people, from oneself.”
Virginia Woolf
Yeah well, I didn’t go to Yale, I went to UConn, and pretty much flunked out of there, spent years homeless, spent years living in and out of homeless shelters, but the fact is what I learned in that journey was far, far more important than anything I could have possibly learned at UConn or Yale or gosh, Harvard. None of us had anyone hand us $300 million. I rubbed shoulders with a lot of men and women who lost it all, who had no shot at much of anything, but still, day by day, they obeyed the law, did what they could to earn some cash to keep it together for their families. Life at the bottom isn’t about honors or law school plans, it is about living simply and so near the ground one can pretty much hear the worms. Humiliation is what life is about in Trump’s world, but humility, that is the greatest lesson learned at the bottom of the pile. We are all the same, we human beings, no one is above or below. That, and try and make a friend or two along the way, you never know when you might need someone to bail you out…
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All year long, people like me collect gently used bras and feminine hygiene products, shampoos, and toothbrushes and during the holiday season, in every town, village, and subdivision, there are Santa’s helpers making sure that the most essential needs are not forgotten.
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“And still, after all this time,
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”
Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.”
― Hafiz
“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.”
― Andrew Boyd, The Agony of Being Connected to Everything in the Universe
There is always one somewhere. An ordinary man or woman, who shows extraordinary strength when it’s needed the most.
I had this iron rule. I would not hire anybody with a felony for a violent crime, and I would not hire an addict. And now guess what? Exactly! I hired a new helper for my workshop, and she is both. She is an addict, and she spent one year in prison for a violent crime.
“Pinpoint a moment in your past where you had to make a big decision.” Well, let me try.
Was my biggest decision to give this funny American guy my phone number and address, not knowing he would turn out to be the love of my life and my husband for so many years?