Yesterday I spent a few hours with a lovely group of women. My running buddy Tina, who knows how to give a party and even more importantly, how to relax to enjoy it while it’s happening, had a lunch for some of her friends and invited me to join them. While already an artist, Tina went back to school full time recently for an art degree and with five year old twins, you might think it would be all she could do to manage school and family without throwing mid week lunch parties especially since much of the time she does it all on her own. Her husband Henry works in the music industry and is usually on the road, so she just carries on with school and family life alone when he’s gone, always making time to meet up with friends or teaching her girls things like the pleasures of surfing. Whereas I can be a bit of a hermit, she seems always on the go with a full schedule of social gatherings and activities for herself and the girls that I sometimes envy.
The friends she had gathered around her yesterday are some that she has known for years and while I had met and chatted with a few of them at previous events, this was the first time I felt I could relax and really begin to get to know them. It was an afternoon that I needed having been in a bit of funk this week, a little soup for the soul, delicious and warm, along with the laughter of new friends to help me nestle down a bit deeper into the life I’m creating here.
The comments I’ve had here at GOTJ this week have been uplifting as well and while we haven’t had a chance to break bread together as we did yesterday at Tina’s table, I want to say again how much I appreciate my increasing circle of online friends and your encouragement and support.
Gifts Of The Journey 
It’s a funny thing these blogging friendships. To explain to a non blogger is impossible. Virtual friends, people you have never met in real life, how can you have a friendship with them? I have accepted that my non blogging real flesh and blood friends will never understand the way bloggers share each others journeys. How they support and encourage through the comments left on each others blogs.
It is lovely to hear you describe meeting some new friends but also know that you have support through your blog readers.
Hopefully between the new friends around you and your readers you will get a balance of friendship to get you through good days and cloudy ones…
Here..here. To your ever-expanding circle of online friends!!!
I resonate with the ‘bit of a hermit’ etc part. I know I feel better when I get in amongst it and others, but still, overcoming the inertia which for me is not about laziness but some ill-defined, not quite positive view of myself, is something I push and pull with a lot in my life at the moment. Being with many different kinds of people is something I will miss immensely as I move out of corporate life: the familiarity and company of others, the mental stimulation, some of the routine. We grouse about processes but they too contribute to a structure I find lean on, even while I fight it to establish myself on my own terms, living values that I feel are more aligned to who I am and who I want to be.
I think how social we are is contextual as well. Those with children tend to be pulled into activities related to their children, but show me a mother who doesn’t wish occasionally they had a bit more time to themselves, and envies the hermits!
You know, I wonder if your things arriving from the USA, as much as you eagerly anticipated them, might have made things harder in one subtle respect. Which is, that the things “of the USA” are are no longer there but with you in Cornwall, but its not the same. On one level, duh, you are in Cornwall. On another, perhaps the potential for ‘turkey sandwich moments’ is very high. All the emotions, memories and feelings we have around so much of our things and actions, rooted in a time and place that taps into all our senses, that we seek out when one part of the experience is triggered. Some one says “Christmas” and our knee jerk response is to think “cinnnamon buns” that we can almost taste. Our own mini rituals and expectations. “In January, I go skiiing/clean the house from top to bottom/catalogue all my photos,” or whatever it may be.
These activities and thoughts may be subconscious, but I think we feel their lack even when we have consciously chosen to do something different. Month by month, you are forging and building new synapses in your life, new patterns of activity, habits, reactions, expectations; new things that are instinctive and feel like the comfort of a nest that is truly yours. Making gaps, filling gaps, finding entirely new aspects of life. Merging old and new, consciously and unconsciously. Not just you, but any one going through big changes, who grieves and adjusts with any transition on many levels. Is it any wonder that missing what we may not even realise is there, sometimes gets the better of us?
I go make a cuppa and ponder my own medicine here. So glad you had such a great day. Marcie’s toast works for me!
I need a friend like Tina. She sounds lovely. The funk, me too.
It was a pleasure to have you Elizabeth…. and thanks for your more than kind words. Lets do it once a month I say!!!!!!
That bread looks delish. Glad you had a good time 🙂
Sounds like it was the tonic you needed. I tend to become hermit like myself from time to time. I have wonderful friends who recognize that about me and take me out of my doldrums.
And what kind of bread is that? It looks divine!
I love your blog because of your beautiful pictures and your beautiful words…and I hope that over time I will be able to add myself to your list of online friends, you are a special person.
And the bread? OMG.
Lunch sounds, looks and I bet tasted, fab. Here, here, to on-line friends, it’s a strange but lovely thing. Sxxxxxx
Tina is a pretty amazing person 🙂 (You sound nice too Elizabeth)
I’m so glad you were able to bathe in the glow of Tina’s hospitality and wonderful WOMEN. I know how much one can miss girlfriends, living in a place that is only beginning to be ‘home.’
I’ve been away from the blogs this week, so have only now read your last few days’ posts. I hope the river is flowing and calming and that whatever is causing you pain is lessening. I don’t know what really to say, but just add my voice to the chorus of those who support you.
The Bread is Rosemary and sea salt Focaccia bread and is divine!!!
It does look very tasty…
All of a sudden I thought of the jingle . . .
“Frosted Lucky Charms, they’re Magically Delicious!”
tee hee