Hers: BatGrrl and Day 21 of Metta

 

When I was younger, I used to write. Lots. Journaling, poetry, prose, unfinished short stories, nonsensical musings, and all kinds of whatever flowed easily from my pencil. I never did much with it. I’d get ideas about doing “readings” or putting together performance pieces. But nothing ever really came from those ideas. That is until I met BatGrrl (name changed to protect identity). BatGrrl was a writer – what I considered a Real Writer. She’d published a couple of things and even put out her very own zine that was sold at the local hipster thrift-and-not shop. She wrote every day and always had something new to share, something fabulously funny or culturally relevant. She was smart, informed, creative, hysterical, and spontaneous. But best of all, she read my writing and liked it. She liked it enough that she put some of my pieces in her zine. She liked it enough that she encouraged me to keep writing, encouraged me to read what I’d written to others, to share it. More than she probably ever knew, BatGrrl was my greatest support. If she thought I could, then I could.

Until, one day…

We unintentionally yet explosively broke each other’s hearts, ending a friendship that maybe did, maybe didn’t need to end…A few years went by and those years seemed to heal the pain. We came back together only to break each other’s hearts again in a much more subtle way. Or maybe they never really healed. The how’s and why’s of that first heartbreak are irrelevant now. We were both doing what we thought we had to do.

It’s the second heartbreak that interests me today. Mostly because I don’t even think we knew it happened. It showed up in the time that passed. In the life changes, the moves, the loves, the loss, all unshared. For me – it showed up in the writing that stopped coming. And the irrational fear of reaching out. It’s been more than 9 years since BatGrrl and I first reconnected – a connection maintained only through the modern miracle of Facebook - more than 9 years since we’ve spoken. Almost as many years since I’ve written with any seriousness.

And then, day 21 of my metta practice comes along...

Everyday I’ve been sitting; I’ve been cultivating and realizing the open heart and compassion of loving-kindness. Almost every day, I’ve been writing, writing about my experience with the metta practice, writing about my relationship with my husband, writing about whatever comes to mind.

When we practice metta, we are open to the truth of our actual experience, changing our relationship to life. Metta – the sense of love that is not bound to desire, that does not have to pretend that things are other than the way they are – overcomes the illusion of separateness, of not being part of the whole. – Sharon Salzberg, Loving-Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness

And here on day 21, open to the truth of my actual experience, open to the truth of life, I receive a message from a dear old friend. A hand reaching out from years gone past. A hand seeking and offering forgiveness. It seems to me that loving-kindness and compassion are the seeds from which forgiveness grows, forgiveness toward others and forgiveness toward ourselves. Someone somewhere and everyone everywhere once said there are no coincidences. It is no coincidence that on day 21 of my metta practice, day 21 of a newly rediscovered and loved writing practice that BatGrrl reaches out of the darkness of our past and says hello and I say hello back...