A Man and a Woman, Traveling
What I learned about friendship this weekend
To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:
Fierce and Tender Wisdom
I didn’t have time to mention it in today’s Morning Journal, but an important part of my learning this weekend came from Mirabai Starr’s book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of Women Mystics.
Tomorrow night I will attend the fourth of seven sessions of Mirabai’s “Awaken the Mystic Within” online course. It’s based on her latest book, Ordinary Mysticism: Your Life as Sacred Ground. I wasn’t surprised to be one of just a few men taking the course. But I feel welcome, and I’m learning a lot.
As Mirabai wrote in Wild Mercy, published in 2019:
You don’t have to be female yourself to walk through these gates. Men are welcome here. You just don’t get to boss us around or grab our breasts or solve our problems.
On Friday night, I realized I had bossed Darlene around and tried to solve a problem she was having. Her longtime friend Michel had texted that she was too busy for us to visit. At my prompting, Darlene texted back, “NP. Next time.”
That’s how I would have replied if it were a guy friend of mine in a similar situation. As soon as Darlene sent the text, I knew it was wrong. It wasn’t based on the fierce and tender wisdom of women, mystics or not.
Since then, Darlene has consulted with her friend Tish and reached out again to Michel, who, as Darlene intuited, is going through a tough time. “I need my Vitamin D,” Michel told my wife, who has the power of sunshine in her friendships and, it goes without saying, her marriage.
This afternoon we are headed to spend the night at Michel’s. It will be very good to see her. Michel is the widow of Leroy Peterson, my closest friend when I worked at a gas company in Casper, Wyoming.
Leroy loved telling the story of how I used to strum my guitar in my vice president’s office and how the retired head of the company walked down the hall one day to Leroy’s office and asked what the hell I was up to.
“Oh, that’s just how he settles his thoughts,” Leroy explained. Oh, how we’d laugh as we remembered that one.
I apologized to Darlene for my manhandling of her reply to Michel, and I’m very glad we are headed to Fairfield today. The incident gave me new appreciation for the mystical bonds that women often share in their friendships.
Yesterday we visited a longtime friend of mine, Ben Beach, in Alexandria. We had lunch at his house and joined him at a Halloween parade featuring a headless bicyclist and dogs and kids in cool costumes.
“Well, I guess we need to find a place to charge the Tesla,” I said about three hours after we had arrived. Which we did.
“Why did you leave after such a short visit?” Darlene asked me in the car.
This confused me, because I felt as if Ben and I had both had a great time and that nothing was missing. This morning Ben emailed me that he had thoroughly enjoyed our visit.
“It’s a guy thing,” I told Darlene.
From Mirabai’s course and her books, I am gaining appreciation for the mystery of male and female. As she writes in Wild Mercy:
“…we all contain both feminine and masculine elements in our psyches, and they vary in degree at different phases of our lives and in response to changing conditions.”
A man and a woman traveling together can sometimes get on each other’s nerves.
If they are lucky, they can also learn anew what makes the world go round.
At least at our age men finally understand why women want so many bathroom stops.