"Life
will break you.  Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone
won't either, for solitude will also break you with it's yearning.  You
have to love.  You have to feel.  It is the reason you are here on
earth.  You are here to risk your heart.  You are here to be swallowed
up.  And when it happens that you are broken or betrayed, or left, or
hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and
listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their
sweetness.  Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could."

~Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

A friend sent this quote to me after we mined the metaphor of story and its importance in our lives during our worship yesterday. They are beautiful words, ones to be read over and over, rolling them around in both mouth and mind. They speak to what it means to live, truly live and to come to those important moments of truth and to walk from them with little or no regret. How many of us cane say we do this? I know I have many times, at least in the small moments of my days, when I can dance the steps of regret. Oh, if only I had said this, done that, felt this way, thought this thought. It is a path of little joy.

These past days I have been in the ever moving process of saying goodbye to a friend and colleague who is moving away from Minnesota. At the least little word or memory, we can dissolve into tears…some of laughter and some of sadness. There is no way of out running the ways in which life will break us. But if our loving has been real and our feeling has been full, the breaking seems somehow worth it all. It brings meaning, real meaning, to our lives. It is not a sentimental meaning, like a well crafted Hallmark card poem framed in lace and meant to be preserved between the well kept pages of a heavy book.. It is the loving and feeling of risk….heart-risk….which is most often messy and leaves us ripped and our edges torn but feeling more alive than is believable. This kind of loving,this kind of risk means we've really given our selves to another, to the world, which is probably the true definition of living.

The trees in Minnesota have lost all their leaves now. They stand like naked sentinels connecting Earth with Heaven. Their leaves have fallen, been blown away and are beginning this very moment to nurture the soil beneath their trunks. I pray that I have been as present to the beauty of the spring, summer and fall of 2008 as I could. When spring arrives next year, my friend will not be here to see the buds open on the Minnesota birch and maples. As she goes on to new adventures in a place where spring comes much earlier and lasts much longer, it is the sweetness of friendship I will remember…..and feel blessed.