Making Friends With Goodbye: Private home with Elise in Wailea, Maui: April 22, 2018.
"I hope today will be a lighter highway, for friends are found on every road. Can you ever think of any better way, for the lost and weary travellers to go?" --Elton John, Friends
One of the first suggestions in the yoga sutras about how to quiet the mind is maitri, usually translated as friendliness. Making friends, real ones, is, as Patanjali and Elton John both say, a great way for the "lost and weary traveler to go".
I was attracted to Maui for her surface charms, fresh air, clean warm water, and perfumed flowers. What makes her most precious, though, is her people, the friends I've made. What has healed my heart the most is the 'Aloha! Welcome Home!', the outstretched arms and sunny smiles of being reunited. We make plans to get together and actually do. Catching up is a deep sharing and the burden of feeling defeated is lifted in their presence. Maui is a particularly transient and semi-permanent place for many which makes her a potent teacher for good-byes. After all, Aloha means both hello and good-bye.
A group of good friends gathered this morning to practice Aloha. I'm just returning to the island, and another is leaving. Its sweet, and its sad, its everything and its nothing. Underneath it all is the joyous energy of now-ness that all the sages are trying to help us remember. Being together was a magic salve powerful enough to close the door of self pity and put my whiney baby self in the corner with enough perspective that as far as I can see, she can stay there for good.
Elise shared Melodie Beattie's Good-bye, which was clearly meant to guide us all in our navigation of friends. Part of me listened to it tuned to the Carson house and it dawned on me the beauty of the house wasn't the house at all, but the friends I made and came to love in the valley.
I'm on to building a new house now. I can only do this with excellence by closing down for real the old house and the old me who has been lingering in uncertainty and fear. I am grateful for the lessons learned in the old house, some of the deepest not seen or felt until I started moving.
Like the yoga movement practice today, and seeing friends, like laughing and remembering its not about where you live, but how you live.
Yeah, I'm building my new house on a solid foundation of Love and I'm looking forward to friends, new and old to be with me in my life's adventures and in the home of my heart, which in the end is the only place that really matters.
Health, Love, and Rock N Roll