three purple hearts

A long time ago in a life that seems very far from now, I heard a story about raising a special needs child. It told of planning a trip and learning a language, and getting all prepared to go to Italy… and then arriving and finding yourself in Holland. The writer wrote beautifully about how it was sad to not have made it where you were aiming to be… but also about the beauty of the place where you are.   I learned that story as we were finding out diagnoses and realizing the realities of the life we would live as far as we could tell them to be at that time. And ever since then I have dreamed of going to Holland. Tulips have long been my favorite flower, and I have very much grown into a vibrant and colorful life as I have done the work to love myself and the world around me in healthier ways.  On Wednesday night, I left home to make a last minute effort to get to my younger brother’s wedding. I kept wanting to just buy a ticket and go but I wasn’t sure until the very last min...

I think it’s funny how often we perceive someone else to be ahead of us on the journey... This caught my attention in a conversation with a friend I used to have years ago and came back to mind when I was reflecting on how that relationship has changed me in its slow ending… It’s a trick of the mind, I think. Like when you’re falling asleep and all the sudden you startle as if you are somehow really falling. Or how you can close your physical eyes and pull something to your mind’s eye to examine closely even though it’s nowhere near you. For most of my years knowing this person, it felt like they were out there ahead of me somewhere… and I just wished that someday I could be up there and helping people, too. As I did my healing work, reality seemed to shift a bit… and for a while I looked around and wasn’t sure where they were. If I closed my eyes, I could pull them to mind, but I wasn’t sure where they were or if we were even in the same space anymore. As I finished up some work t...