It’s Friday and I don’t know where Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday went.  Having lived each of them I should, and I suppose I do, but there’s a definite sense of where and what and how does this happen?  Friday, already?

My daughter gives me three sprigs from her mint plant in a spice jar filled with water.  I place it on my desk, hoping to infuse my workspace with freshness, with calmness, with mint-ness.  One stem reaches left and up, one stem leans right, dips down, the middle stem is decidedly center.  It feels a perfect balance of left-right-center, an embodied inverse of quadratic function, or this: a story of reaching, of bowing, of holding center.

I step outside my comfort zone.  Like the mint, I reach, out, unknowingly plotting points for x and y, these points miraculously revealing mirrored y’s and x’s, reflected counterpoints that lean, in.  Left and up, right and down, center.  This week is one of wholeness, like a field left fallow now ready for planting, for growing, for ripening, the rounding of some bend, the closing of some circle, the closing which is also an opening.  The deliberateness, the all-along intentions, melding seamlessly into something new, something other, something I didn’t know to ask for but which, with surprising serendipity, has landed in my lap, has drifted into my heart.  

This sounds code for something but isn’t code at all.  It is simply a story of living, of reaching and bowing, of holding steady, of being ready, of being willing, of having honest conversations with the people in our lives, those we know well, those we are beginning to know.  There is no code, just story.  There are no answers; instead, poetic possibility.

At week’s end, I receive a small package from a dear student.  She has made me a tiny book, she has made me a card, she has written me a note.  Inside the card, she writes three quotes and I love them all but especially the second one, the one that lands in the center of the page, the one that embodies her gift (that embodies her), the one that is the thread weaving itself through my week, this week in whose pace I temporarily lost myself but, now, feel center once again, am here, am receiving All there is to receive.  The mint has guided me with its freshness, its calmness, its mint-ness—leaning, bowing, holding center.

Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.
~ Leo Tolstoy ~

P.S. I hope you have a beautiful, minty sort of day.

P.P.S. Write with me in the comfort of your home (or local coffee shop :).

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