This past week at Crow Agency has been memorable . . . from creating new memories while being flooded and washed over with old ones. And It's been worth every dollar I've spent to get here and every paycheck gone unclaimed. It's been worth facing every fear and doubt that raised their ugly heads over the past two years and screamed in my mind that I'm foolish and crazy to travel the uttermost road. There's no turning back now. It's full steam ahead into familiar and yet uncharted waters. Bring it on, monsters of my mind. I'm ready. Creator has my back!
Reconnecting . . . implies an initial connection. We make them all the time, connections, that is. Be they intentional or "random," we're surrounded by a web of connections . . . from business connections in the professional world, to the bombardment of digital connections from the World Wide Web and social connections on networks like Twitter and Facebook. Think about it. Without connections, we're isolated, alone, perhaps even imprisoned by our own choosing to be separate from the many worlds around us. It's everyone's choice . . . to be connected to this or that. But there's one connection that supersedes any other. It's a connection that trumps everything else in life in terms of meaning and significance . . .
. . . the human connection.
Human connection intersects at the core of our being. It's of the most vital kind of connection that we experience. We can't live or even exist without it. Human connection transcends time and space, fame and fortune, culture and customs. And in this day and age, it transcends smartphones and Facebook.
Having said this, just yesterday I posted on Facebook about my amazement of its ability to connect, the way it has reconnected people from relationships that melted away through indifference and dissolved over time. That's my experience anyway . . . reconnecting on Facebook with people that I had basically forgotten due to the passage of time and movement in space.
It's mind boggling, really. I've returned in space to the place where human connections were made in time over two decades ago, connections now being re-viewed in my memory and being re-connected in my present reality. And digital reality has a part to play in it. Oddly, though I'm here in body living out of my fifth wheel trailer within just a few houses, blocks, and short distances to the homes of human connections from my past, I'm reconnecting via Facebook from my RV in the present. Amazing. Times have certainly changed when I can connect to the internet on free wifi as I sit in the city park in the middle of Crow Agency!
It's heartwarming to say the least, these reconnections. I look forward to many more before my ship sails on from here. But as wonderful and uplifting as these reunions have been, on several occasions I've also felt a deep sense of disconnect . . . disconnected from the moorings that held me here so many years ago. It's bittersweet. Countless tides have rolled in and out since then, bringing wave after wave of new connections and relationships. Yet even more profoundly, I realize that a greater reason for this sense of disconnect that has surfaced in my emotions is because I'm here alone. Every connection I made here in the past I made together with Toni. Everything Crow past seems woven tightly together with a "Toni thread." Being here in the present feels strange and out of balance. I'm disconnected, in some way, from this place because she's not here with me. That's simply how I feel at times.
But the story doesn't end here. I'm reminding myself that there's a far greater reality. As I started off saying, human connections transcend time and space. The precious moments and vital experiences we share with others lives on . . . in the pathways of memories past that influence the roads we choose to walk into the future. I'm realizing that Toni's thread . . . and our life influence together . . . is still active and alive. I've heard it in the recollections from my reconnections. There's nothing more powerful, more lasting, or more transformational than human connection and encounter that is birthed and enveloped in love.
Nothing.
Not a thing . . . because love is not a thing . . . its a relationship, both human and divine.
Feeling disconnected? All the more reason to love your guts out!