Sitting in the Nether Lands

I read once that the average person falls in love seven times in their life.

It makes sense I guess as seven is the perfect number. Perhaps as we make our way through relationships with the first six we evolve to the place where we love more perfectly.

Of course many people fall in love, get married, stay married though they may or may not stay in love. That is the expectation anyway. Once you get married then you’re supposed to stay married! Dammit! Even if love goes away or it is someone else who makes your heart leap.

Obviously I am not average. I’ve fallen in love countless times, far more than seven, though if I sit here and try to count I start forgetting the names of people that I’ve fallen in love with. Later someone else pops into my heart.

A friend of mine explained to me recently that she believes that there is this perfect lover out there waiting for her. She just hasn’t found him yet. Or vise versa. But she believes that it is someone who will only love her, never have a straying eye, and “be hopelessly devoted to”… her.

She is a romantic. And I am too. I believe those things.

The other day my friend Mitch and I talked as I stood on my beloved back deck and he stood on his. He then followed it up by writing me. “I hate that life has handed you this particular load of crap. I've discovered that life is not really concerned with being fair. We just have to handle it the best we can. In the midst of it, I love that friends can be there for one another - if not in person, then at least by phone.”

I have pondered long over his words.

Certainly life isn’t always fair and every one of us has been dealt loads of crap. And God knows we handle it the best way that we can because that is the only way that we know how to handle it. And thank God for friends otherwise none of us would get through anything.

“I’ve been loved and I’ve been hated, mental health is over rated,” sing the Barenaked Ladies, and I certainly have had my fill of both. And it drives you nuts!

Falling in love makes you crazy and falling out of it drives you insane. And either way we get through it the best way that we know how. Hopefully friends are involved.

I now sit in the Nether Lands (thank you Dan Fogelberg) “cause I want a lover and I want some friends.” And I’m trying to figure out “where do I go when I get to the end of my dreams?”

And I sit on my beloved back deck on this quiet peaceful morning, the sun is shinning on me through the Palm Tree and dancing on Fran’s thousand shades of green. A red sky has turned brilliantly blue. The sea sings in the distance and birds form halos over my head.

My heart is filled with the love of friends who are so wonderfully devoted that they make me thank God for them. And if God is love as the Bible says then our circle of friends is this dance of lovers and it is that dance that gets us through.

Though there is always this one.

Waiting.

And when love happens.

It explodes!