A note stuck to my computer reads, “I hope you’re well, and that the new year will be kind to you.”

It’s a line that seems personal, as though taken from a longer letter, but was pulled from a 2010 workshop chat log at the start of 2020, when I needed to remember the feeling of being seen and guided, rooted to a less society-bound vision, less swept up in the struggles of the day.

In 2010, the US was a few years into the Obama presidency, and I was newly involved with work meaningful to me on a surface level and to a higher contemplative aspiration. I was beginning to execute decisions I’d been frightened to make, having a heightened experience overall. A smooth stone in a gushing stream, this voice held steady kindness, reminding me that whatever else was going on, the eye-on-the-ball was whether I was becoming kind and present in the midst of it all, or not.

It eased my heart, then and now.

Sadly, there are many estrangements in my life, but also tremendous, enduring, even while subtle, encounters… dreams endlessly becoming persons and situations and dreams again. Not much seems meant fit into my life in a finite way.

Sometimes, when I can find an edge of that and settle into it with appreciation, without trying to pin relationship down to definition, a vast and glowing field appears.