Dear Friends,
Sanctuary from the storm
Amongst you, I find my favourite place.
It’s a place that opens up into warmth, and that soft, exciting kind of joy that bursts open the bud of happiness.
If you were a building, you would be a bookshop full of diverse books bursting with knowledge. It would have a cafe, for refreshment that also served a range of my favourite food, and also be like a cathedral, a sanctuary. For you are knowledge, refreshment and a sanctuary away from the worst of my pain.
Knowledge when you teach me things and help with choices.
Refreshment when you renew my strength, my hope.
Sanctuary, for with you I am separate from the storms of the world.
Sometimes there are those that bring the storms with them. Sometimes I’m not aware, being in the eye of the storm. But when the damage is done, and as so many have come and gone in the past, it is not always the case that all they leave behind are wrecks or splinters. There is joy in those memories as well. Life is complex, so are humans. And sometimes, I confess, the person who brings the storms is me. Hopefully, I have learnt to keep more of my eye on the sun.
And of course, it is a place I am sometimes not at my best. Banter and misunderstandings are still a learning curve, but it is still worth whatever difficulty.
So why choose it as my favourite place, even though there are issues in the past, present, and sure to be future? Well, the place isn’t perfect, but that’s part of its perfection. As paradoxical as that is.
But really…
My friends can be the best parts of me. A friend once told me we are made up of all those we meet, during a time I could have chosen to cut off many more in my life. And that is true. We are patchwork people. Stitched together with those we have met, some more for the good, some more for the bad, and all those nuances.
The place arises wherein a great gathering of my friends are. They could be from a group of friends fostered by the passing of years that mature like wisdom or even the blossoming of a new friendship destined to grow into a second family.
My favourite place is where I am with friends, and this is where my letter ends,
Stefan
