Spring Awakening

There are some kinds of conversations that catch you off guard.

Or rather they sit surprisingly well with you when you might never have thought you could listen calmly to what someone was telling you.

A friend, a one-time colleague whom I have known for over ten years, called me this past week.

She wanted to tell me about a Sunday afternoon she had spent with a friend. The quality of the time she spent with her was out of the ordinary in her life. It left her smiling, she said, uncontrollably and continually. It made the household to which she was returning in a few hours' time and the commitments that bound her to the people who shared that household with her no longer the only important thing in her life.

And I think that startled her.

And I think she knew that it might startle me.

And I may have been one of the few people that she could comfortably risk startling with the degree of her own surprise. And delight. And hunger.

My own life, I realize afresh, relishes those moments when someone tells me where space and possibility and unexpected joy have appeared in their life, opening them to how much bigger their lives might one day be.



Photo from Slow Muse