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your journey


Feeling alone can be the worst emotion in the world. We all need
someone who understands us and loves us just as we are. A young
friend of mine is struggling with feeling like the proverbial black sheep.
I’ve been there — a lot. Stupid thing is, there’s not a bloody thing wrong with me (or her — or you?)  that isn’t wrong with most of the human race.

Feeling alone. For the most part I think it can be attributed to the fact that (no matter what your religious persuasion or lack of) we’re not human beings having a spiritual experience in this body (and I use the word spiritual in a generic sense), we’re spiritual beings having a human experience, and quite a few of us don’t know how to reconcile the two.

My friend was really struggling this morning. I wish I could help. But when someone is going through that strange place, the most we can do is come alongside them and hold the torch high enough for them to see where they’re at in their journey. Her particular struggle is like mine, so I know that territory all too well. She is one of the loveliest, most intuitive folks I’ve ever met. So this morning I tried to hold that torch up a little higher…

***

My dear, you seem to miss the fact that for most of us this journey isn’t about food at all. And for those who think that, the time will come when they realize that’s an erroneous assumption. Food isn’t the problem. The problem is how we USE food in our lives to fill in the gaps, take up the slack, stop ourselves from feeling. Your only problem is YOU realize this, which is why you feel so alienated at the moment…

And you are not alone, my “Rare” friend. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve filled my personal, handwritten journal with the breathings of my heart — with words that could have been what you wrote today. Feeling alone is not an uncommon condition. I believe it’s the uncommon person who NEVER feels alone. And to me it’s the scariest word in the English language.

Most of us surround ourselves with other people thinking that will fix it. It doesn’t. There’s nothing worse than feeling alone in a roomful of people. So, my friend, there are more of us than you can even imagine. You were just reading those blogs from a place of reality and enlightenment. That’s a gift. And your words to folks were not hollow. We all NEED those words to keep going on your individual journeys. So bless you for ignoring your own confusion and offering what encouragement you could to folks.

Being alone… It makes you feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Saturday Night

We’ve company coming tonight–
good friends all–
so there’s much I have to do.
Clean the toilet, dust the furniture,
buy beer and snacks for them to eat
while they sit around the kitchen table
thinking through their hands of cards,
arguing politics with sarcastic remarks,
and chuckling over nonsensical jokes.

And while this hobbit-like
merrymaking takes place,
the sipping and nibbling,
debating and laughing,
there I will sit
in the midst of it all
feeling oddly out of place,
smiling appropriately,
laughing when necessary,
but quietly asking myself
for the hundredth time,
“Why am I here?”
or maybe just, “Why AM I?”

(Written 3/13/04)