The best thing is often the hardest to do.

My face is wet with tears because someone posted a loving note - someone who has had my class before, someone I managed not to ruin.  How does that happen?  To the writer, I'm humbled by your words seemingly unfit for me, and grateful you were kind enough to tell me I helped rather than hindered you.  I wish you peace in your long journey, wherever it takes you, warning you that being true to yourself is an often lonely but always worthwhile pursuit.  Please keep in touch and let me know how it goes.  And thank you for the grace you gave me.  It meant a great deal to me.

And the best thing?  That isn't what we want to do; it is the thing we avoid, that we are destined for, perhaps, that we're drawn to inexplicably.  The thing we put relationships and medications in the way of, and yet it seeks us, to our dying day it seeks us and is relentless in its murmurings of what's undone.  That nagging thing we fear because it is for us to do alone, and that's the last place we want to be for long.  And yet there it is, glorious and terrifying and waiting - always waiting, without sound, without tiring.  I am lonely right now, trying to look away from it.  But I know why I'm out here by myself.  It hurts, and I'm tired, but I'm not exhausted.  I've known this would happen for years, and now I finally believe that I won't ever get away from it.  No position, no amount of time, no person can remove it.  My job is to surrender to it, to allow it to take me into the words and the paint and trust in what happens.  It isn't up to me, anyway.  "If you're playing too small a game, you'll sabotage the game you're in just to have something to do."  Peter McWilliams.

Shalom.