Grace II

Yesterday was a day of Travel Unpleasantness. I was traveling back from TO to BC, and everything minor that could go wrong did. I left in a torrential downpour, and my cab navigated sheets of water pouring off the gardiner and axel-high floods on the lakeshore. The first plane was broken, then there was a gate change, gnarly children, delays. I ended up with a squishy middle seat next to a trembling vodka-sucking man because a family with tiny children had been split up and I gave the mom and baby my seat. My little seatback tv didn't work. I lost my debit card, at a time that my bank account holds ALL MY WORLDLY goods, in the form of the proceeds from my loft sale. My online community was having a meltdown, a kind of aftermath of an intense-supporting-someone time that sort of ... dissolved... in a kind of unsatisfactory way.

And. I had a transforming day. I was working up quite a head of irritability when we were sitting on the hot tarmac waiting for fuel, and I decided that instead of aimlessly flicking through podcasts and knitting grumpily, I should read a chapter that KP had written for our book, on CMM as a spiritual practice.

The piece is magnificent, and it instantly elevated me. K was exploring our transforming communication work as "spiritual" practice, through a very personal reflection of identifying moments of grace through the aftermath of BP's cancer diagnosis. It shunted me immediately to my higher self-concept as "person who seeks complexity and can therefore metabolize complications easily," and I was able to relax into the rest of the trip... and toast my arrival with some ahi tuna and a glass of chardonnay down at the waterfront.

I'm happy to be back here, and things seem so much more possible.