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 HappinessAnd 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...
