An Opening Question

I have had an unusual week.

First, my visitors arrived from Norway. Then visitors arrived from Colorado.

The visitors came because of A Course of Love. Storker and Tone from Norway. Dale and Michele from Colorado.

Storker wanted so much to demonstrate the way A Course of Love is shared in Norway. Tone followed an urge to come along. Both are at work translating the course into Norwegian. We spent the weekend together. Much was demonstrated.

They have now come and gone. They are in the air as I write, but I left them (or them me) Monday night after dinner here. About 9:00 they asked that I sign their books and I went into my sunroom to sit quietly enough to say something more than “Love, Mari.” After a few minutes Tone joined me. We talked until nearly 11:00. She told me, “I like your family very much. They are very strong. I can see why you get exhausted.” She also told me to tell them that I see and admire their strength, that I’d like a little bit of it, and that maybe they’d like to be a little like me. It was a kind suggestion but she could have stopped at saying she sees why I get exhausted around my very likeable family. I call it drama and commotion and she sees it as strength. I don’t know if I ever realized that I am simply surrounded by strong personalities.

Today Michele and Dale came for being in town anyway. Still, they were the second set of out-of-town guests to join me in the cabin (so odd...these two sets of visitors in less than a week). I’d cleaned earlier, so all I had to do was sweep her out. Coming back in tonight, there is a light design on the desk that I’ve never seen before, the sun falling through the side window and casting one of the lace cut-out designs onto the oak. Made of small circles around an almond shape, it looks like an eye.

Here…I notice everything. I feel as if I share of myself so intimately when I have people out here. Without saying a word.

Much of the weekend, and today’s visit too, concerned the ways in which we share.

I had another demonstration of dialogue’s spontaneity – a natural flow as I waited with Dale and Michele for a local friend of theirs to join us. We stood in the front yard tossing the ball to Sam until it was dripping with slime, and then moved in to the kitchen table where the conversation continued in a round-robin way, everything being said hitting the right note like musicians playing in the same key.

Eventually the local friend arrived, we went out to the cabin, and after some acclimation to the stillness and the art and appreciation for the awesome feel of the place, the talk changed into the kind that happens when someone new arrives and there is more formality, and the talking, as well, feels like a definition of why you have gathered: “This is what we are to do. We’ve sat down to talk.” It was fine, just not quite the same.

And so…amidst the gratitude for my visitors…there is the question, a question about what we share of who we are and what makes it happen. An opening question.