Persist

So, very busy, thence mostly absent from here. The Autumn sunshine, between rainstorms, is glorious and I feel shut away from it, imprisoned in my office and in my own damaged and armoured heart. Coming here almost makes this feel worse, as I contemplate the creativity and community glimpsed in recent years, but which continue to be only glimpsed. I often want to run from the painful knowledge of their existence, and yet don't: even a glimpse is a lot, if it's a glimpse of hope, if the beauty and the good people are out there somewhere in a mostly terrifying world, and if the not-quite-dead bits of my heart still yearn for them.

Yesterday I met blogger friend Peter Clothier of The Buddha Diaries (he also blogs for the Huffington Post) and his wife, Ellie Blankfort, on holiday in London: writer and artist, and both of them Buddhist practitioners, from Los Angeles. To have encountered such people on line and now met them in person is such a lovely thing, for which I am amazed and grateful.

I think of Peter's most recent book, a collection of essays on sustaining creativity in our crazy, over-busy times, which is beautifully written, full of hard-won experience and gentle Buddhist wisdom. I think of its title, Persist, and tell myself one more time that I will, that we all must, persist as best and as long as we can with the things that matter to us.