Good Morning Friends & Digital Neighbors! Happy Saturday to all! Hello Dear Phamily, Refugees and Triggeratti! Hey there Fascinating People, Early Birds, Dawn Patrol and of course you Happy Bigots at the Nometry! Oh yeah, and all the rest of you Supports, Members, Lurkers and Wanderbouters of Locals!

Well that was a rather lengthy introduction, but fitting for such a diverse, wonderous and often unlikely gathering of souls in these intentional communities. We can't all know one another, but hopefully you have found some individuals that resonate with you. Perhaps you have found a place where your experience, your thoughts or attitudes are not immediately met with derision or condemnation. By good fortune or just the wandering into the right community you have found a place to visit, perhaps even stay around for a awhile. Its not all serious, but it can be. It is not all endless diversion and personal past times, but they are often shared. It is not just pets, food, music or other passions, but we get a sense of one another when those things are posted. And there is often, if not always, laughter, and at times that deeper sense of resonance with someone mostly unknown but oddly familiar. It can reawaken our humanity. It can remind us of the goodness that is present among us, the amazing normalcy of life that is lost in our current age of division, fear and compulsion.

Good relationships reawaken the heart without muting the mind. If you are fortunate enough to know such people in real life, it is an irreplaceable gift. If your life is devoid of such gifts, and many can be because of the poison about us, finding a place with fresh air makes all the difference. Thankfully there is no perfection present in such places, perfection seems to make many us more intolerable instead of compassionate, but there is plenty of genuineness, even among the guarded and hesitant. In a moment of genuineness, of honesty, vulnerability and surprisingly enough in share laughter, heart can speak to heart. It is hard to hate once that happens. I may not agree with you on some of the basics, even my precious beliefs that define my life, but I can accord you space to find your precious beliefs and see what we might hold in common. Maybe it is only our humanity, but once that it recognized and felt, it is more than enough. Well such thoughts were stirred by this.

Because the mind is always engaged with whatever is happening now, it often forgets who we are. The heart never forgets. Everything of significance is inscribed there. The heart is the archive of all our intimate memory. What is truly felt leaves the deepest inscription. Each of us carries the book of our life inside our heart. Often at night when we dream, we are surprised at how clearly versions of long-forgotten events return with strange clarity. Though we live much of our lives outside, in action and engagement with the world, the deeper impact of what happens is registered in the narrative of the heart.

The shape of the human heart is very distinctive; it is an instantly recognizable image. It is an interesting shape. Neither a circle nor a triangle, it somehow manages to blend both contours. Viewed through the metaphor of the triangle, the heart is a space where the self and its otherness unite to configure the individual presence of the person. This threefold structure is also the structure at work in friendship and love: you, the friend, and the triangle is completed in the “third force,” which is the spirit of the friendship; this is more than the sum of the two dimensions.

John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between

Happy Saturday Friends @ Locals! Winter in Vermont via DDG services!❄