PEACE AND SERENITY

  

This morning I experienced my “Serenity By The Sea.”
A seagull came to visit the girls next door to me and then he wandered over to my deck.
After I snapped about 25 shots of him, I got the perfect shot of my new friend.

We’ll call him Floyd.  Floyd was probably looking for a snack.  But I had none and he wandered off.  I look at the bay and the early morning sun and I cried.  “It is so beautiful here.”  The morning would be filled with packing and arranging final travel plans back to Boston, along with our large closing “Gratitude” meeting. 

This roundup has changed my life.  I finally grieved the loss of so many people.
I opened my eyes to the possibilities of life in ways that surprised me.  I flirted and was flirted with.  And I met some people who changed my life. 

My neighbor Dave for instance.   I get Dave’s humor.  He was in the room at the Inn right next door.  He along with a “posse” of guys on the second floor, became my dinner buddies for two nights.  We would walk into town up Commercial street for an early dinner before our big evening meeting each night.  The first night we ate at Backbay Betsy’s.  The second night at George’s Pizza further up in town.  I cherish the warmth and inclusive nature of these men from the east coast.  They welcomed me into their fold, sharing with me their experience, strength and hope.  I’ve seen  people in LA for years who have never walked across a room to say hello much less invite me to join them in fellowship.  What I learned from these men was how to include everyone and more importantly they taught me to open up my heart!

And for that I am truly grateful.

It stormed on Saturday evening during our big meeting.  The tent held up and the wind whipped the side flaps and the rain pelted the tent and flowed down.  Sitting next to my new friend Dave I gave him a look and he told me a story about the time they held the roundup and had to evacuate the tent because of a storm.  30 minutes after they all got everyone out, half of the tent collapsed!  This did not inspire confidence in me as I watched the big top shaking from storm.  But I sat there with 900+ other people, who are also working on improving their lives one day at a time and realized we were all safe and dry from the storm.  Together we could do this.  The rain continued throughout the hour and a half meeting and then subsided.  Finally it  diminished to a gentle rain.  We are after all halfway out into the Atlantic at the end of the land that the Pilgrims first landed on.

Earlier on Saturday I had hiked up and over the moors to the beach and walked along it’s shore, collecting stones like my Grandmother Mary Alice use to do.  She would bring them back home and put them in her rock garden.  I put mine in a ceramic bowl that I have at home along with sacred stones that I work with during meditation.  These stones carry with them the Atlantic ocean and the healing that I found there on the dunes, overlooking the land pretty much the same as it was found almost 400 years earlier by people that could have been my ancestors.
(There are several Mullins’ in those first pilgrim’s who made that voyage from Europe to the new world and “New England.”)

What I take from this Roundup is a sense of belonging.  As it says in AA’s promises…”we shall know a new freedom and a new happiness.”  When I got up Sunday after the stormy Saturday night and saw the sunshine on the back bay, how could I not embrace the light!  For this place and I are one now.  Forever burned in my mind is a moment in time when I knew that all is right with the world and I am one with it.

Peace and blessings,
GM

Gerry at peace with the world.  Remember we're only borrowing it for the moment we are there, so enjoy your life right where you are.  Someday I will probably buy a place like this but for now I am grateful they let me borrow it, if only for a few days!