Good morning, for once! (usually I've been writing good night times)

I think I will not be able to write all I want in the little time I have before leaving for work but I shall begin. I feel so overwhelmed somehow that I could cry and then laugh again, realising that laughter is there.

For about a year I've been processing the thought of centering myself from myself towards the outer world and people around me.

Yesterday was my birthday and I set myself to the challenge of doing 38 (ooops, is that my age? ;-) acts of random kindness. This thought nailed in to me earlier this summer after I had given a peony from  my garden to a stranger on the street. You see we have the most beautiful peony in our garden, that was the only plant we didn't rip off when we moved in here and didn't then yet know what it was but it seemed like a plant worth keeping and for the three summers we've lived here, it's brought me so much joy!  Last summer I missed the blossoming because we were in France so this summer I was even more anxiously waiting for it to blossom... and when it did, I was drunk with its beauty! :-D And so much that one day, I felt it overflowing in me that I have to share it - and so I took one flower and decided to just give it to someone on the street in the center of town. As I was driving to the center of town, I started thinking all the possible places I could take a flower, a nursing home, hospital...

I kept my decision however to give the flower to someone on the street and so I gave it to a woman outside the library. She was surprised, confused and thrilled at the same time. Just afterwards I went to the library to get some books and was looking for something but ended up in the "wrong" book aisle but there was a book standing looking at me with a title Creative Mind. I looked at it and felt IT was a peony for me - I took the book and read it in two days. It was so much for me, so encouraging to my writing process, as I had thought to write the whole summer and finish "a book" I've started - and I've written NOTHING the whole summer and felt like a lost writer from the words that well up in me in aching to come out.

Anyway... I had been thinking it for some time. My desire to be more courageous, to come "out of me" and to be open to where I am. I mean that when I'm going from place A to place B that  I just don't walk in a tunnel as there is no other purpose for me than that direction between those two poles, but to see with whom I'm maybe standing in line at the grocery store, or if there's someone I could give a hand to, or share a word...

My husband saw a childhood picture of me with boy I was holding with my arm and he made a comment that " Oh, you wanted to own people already then"  What....? Of course he hit it somewhere right, though its never something concious of me. I've had desire to have best friends though I've never wanted to name anyone that way because I consider myself to have a few close friends which I do not want to put in any order... but I've held the thought much in me of wanting to belong to someone, and I think that is something encraved in us as human. Our need to feel loved runs deep.



.....This letter has left unfinished but I will publish it anyway. Aren't letters that way sometimes anyway...

Rina