Being Vulnerable to Gifts - Part 2

Wow!  What a great day and a half I had at the Cape Cod Writers Conference.  Imagine a place where you just walk up to people and ask, "What do you write about?" English gardens, the vegan diet, soldiering in Vietnam, poetry.  Whether novice or published author, all were willing to share advice and experiences.  Sadly, it was nowhere near the shoreline, but I did have an awesome cod dinner.

I knew when I went there something extraordinary would happen.  It did.  But not what I could have foreseen.  I sat reading in the large comfortable lobby when inexplicably I ascended into a state of higher consciousness.  This has happened to me twice before but under very different and very private circumstances.  Here I was out in public!

I began people watching intensely.  The playful exchange between a middle-aged man and his three-year-old daughter.  A gorgeous woman in her 70s looking every inch turquoise blue and seaside fashionable.  My heart blew open.  How extraordinary all these people seemed to me, even though I knew nothing about them.  

Then I saw him, the young man I came here for.  Dressed modestly in a white shirt and black trousers, he politely approached the man at the registration desk and asked for something.  The clerk replied, "We don't have any openings at the moment, but you can fill out our application, and maybe we'll have a job for you in a few weeks."  He took the papers and looked around this bustling lobby.  I smiled and silently drew him over to the empty seat at my table.  Just as silently he spent the next 20 minutes filling out the form.  I heard a persistent voice in my head, "You are so dearly loved.  You are so dearly loved!"  As a Reiki practitioner I knew simply to get out of the way and just hold the space for this love to flood through me to him.  I would glance at him from time to time, but nothing seemed to divert his attention.  Why he needed this gift I'll never know.  But it was imperative that he receive it.  With his application completed, he got up and returned it to the clerk who kindly assured him they'd keep it on file.  Then he walked out.

The rest of the program was immensely helpful to me, and my acquaintance's workshop opened my mind to new ways of writing.  But nothing could compare with this experience.  The conference ended.  The weather turned ugly.  I packed up the car.  It would be a stormy ride back to Connecticut.  As I eased out of the parking lot into the traffic teeming with weekend tourists, I struggled to read the street signs as I made my way out of Hyannis.  And then one last miracle.  I saw my young man biking with a friend through these same streets, smiling and laughing with abandon.  Mission accomplished apparently.

Pax tecum.