Home

Here we are, a year later, and still a dapper young couple. Nothing has been more difficult than living apart for 5 months. I'm going to Durham this weekend and have an interview. I have an interview after next weekend as well. Pray that all goes well and that I can be in Durham with Jami soon. This week has been an arduous week - I've been ill, feverish, and work has been difficult. Emotionally I'm a bit at loose ends. Today in our men's prayer group I learned that I'm not the only one going through some form of that emotional and physical stress. We all have things going on in our lives that wear on us.
Tomorrow is a tough day for me: going to work at 7 am, having a conference with my supervisor and her supervisor -and I discovered this tonight: another supervisor- at CCCG, and then getting on a plane and flying to Durham to be with Jami - which is the highlight of the day.
This may all be too personal to write in a blog. I do typically venture into the realm of arcania or some imaginative flight. But so be it.
Today as I lay sleeping, slipping in and out of hearing NPR on my computer (which is the only way to listen to NPR in Atlanta - Jami and I often wonder why Atlanta has such a poor NPR station, while Chapel Hill has such a good one), I was grateful for being loved. I knew that no matter how difficult things might seem, that love is always victorious. I don't mean victorious in a militaristic way, but in a more enveloping way.
I told my friends in the prayer group tonight that I'd had a mystic experience yesterday. I stood on the quad at Columbia and I looked up in the sky, on one side of me a long gray cloud and on the other a long white cloud, and all the sounds, the thrumming of the air compressors, the chirping of the birds, the whoosh of the wind, were part of a musical piece - the sounds of people playing, the traffic - for a lover of Ives and Boulez this is no stretch: this is what music is. I stood there aware that I was surrounded by love, by Jami's, by my counselor's, by my friends', and by God's, and it seemed to be the most weighty fact of the universe, more weighty than a black hole or neutron star. I felt the mass of love as a pressure passing through all the world, embracing, enveloping, holding all the lost, alone, too busy, over focused souls in the world. I felt it and was aware of it, though I hadn't been seeking it. I had been praying to be lifted out of my sadness at being separated, at feeling alone at work. And there I was and there it was. I told this to my friends, and one of them, who had been playing frisbee golf on the quad said, "that's what you were doing." I asked him if I had seemed strange standing there, and he said no, just that I had looked deep in thought.