A pivotal moment with a dear friend.

It started with a paragraph, whispered aloud:

“The line I’d liked so much at first, “We say God and imagination are one,” began to seem darker. I started to feel it was acknowledging human limitation, addressing the way we invent things to comfort ourselves. That’s when the next line rose up, a line I’d completely overlooked when reading on the page: “How high the highest candle lights the dark.” This image is expansion and limit all at once. Stevens [Wallace Stevens, the poet who wrote those lines] has just told us that our largest, most expansive thoughts are still contained within us, that our sense of God or something larger exists only within our minds. We feel there’s something larger but, no - that’s in our minds. Yet this idea turns again with “how high the highest candle lights the dark”: Even within our human limitations, how beautiful we can be. It’s still just a little candle, but how high: our beauty, our capacity for thought and feeling, for togetherness. Our humanness is vast and ripe and gorgeous, and, as Stevens says at the end of the poem, “being there together is enough.”

It ended with these words, dripping with gratitude:

“And being anywhere together, with all the wonderful people I have had the joy to know, that is enough for me. That is always enough. And I’ve never known why being in your company revitalizes me so completely, and I’m not sure I’ll ever know. But I must let you know, being there together is enough for me too. You help light the darkest points of my life, you help my candle raise up higher. You remove my limits. You encourage my imagination. You raise me higher.”

I am reminded of this moment as a way to find the energy to get through the next couple of days. As some of you might know, I’m going to be moving into my very own space very, very soon. The process is draining. Packing all my possessions into neat boxes has been more difficult than I ever imagined. Deciding what to take and what to leave behind causes me stress - how does Marie Kondo do it? Everything brings me joy. The space is small. Cozy, but small. Sometimes, it feels too far away from the life I have worked on. Sometimes, it feels too far from everyone. I am anxious, nervous, and beyond excited to make this leap; because being there together, with the people I love and care so much for, will be enough. Because having a space of my own will be enough. Because crossing off an item off my to-do list from 2012 will be more than enough.

I want to take this space to thank each and every one of you who take the time to read this, to support me, and to help me grow. I wouldn’t have gotten to this point of my life without you. In fact, I don’t think I’d still be around without you. Thank you isn’t enough but being there with you, is more than enough.