Meeting the Legend

"Give me your hand," she said.

I laid my fingers, face-up, in the cup of her open palm. I could feel the warmth radiating from beneath the surface of her skin, concentrated in a single spot that pulsed, slowly...filling me beat by beat with a soothing, comforting energy.

She closed her eyes, and I studied her face. It was not the perfect, wrinkle-free mask of serenity that I had envisioned when I first glimpsed her from afar. In that moment, my breath caught, seeing heaven in this earthly form.

The creases in her brow betrayed the years of concentration/examination/intropection which were the price of her wisdom. The corners of her eyes showed faint traces of the course worn by tears which could not be contained. The quietude of her expression could not hide the deep laugh lines engraved over years of struggling to learn to laugh with life.

Instead of making her look older, the experiences relayed by these marks made her ageless. This was the source of the radiance I saw from afar -- the radiance of life lived and loved for what it was.

Reflecting

The great thing about having a blog (even one that is updated as infrequently as this one) is the opportunity to look back at my experiences/thoughts/lessons and see how much (or many times how little) has changed over time.

Not having been here in a while, I just took a brief glance back at some of my posts and I don't even recognize many of my own words. It's cool and kinda weird at the same time. So cool to see that I've received such powerful messaging, so weird that even a year or more later, I'm still processing it.

This frustrates me, more than a little. But I need to be patient with myself and remember to be grateful that I even recognized the messages in the first place, that I wrote them down/captured them so that I could have a place to return to and continue the lessons.