Memories

Recently I got back in touch with someone whom I hadn’t seen in more than 40 years. Facebook is sometimes pretty fantastic! Our renewed contact brought back my younger years: the romance, passion, poetry, and beauty that was part of my life then.

While I was reliving all of this again, I realized that this is more than just nostalgia about the past. The meeting and the emotions it brought up remind me that these themes are still very important to me. This was a real wake-up call, a call to bring these themes back into my life.

A call to re-live something is something very different from a flight into the past. My favorite poet, David Whyte, has this to say about it:

Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through our present structures held together by memories not yet fully understood; something understood but not fully understood, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced, something already lived but not fully lived, something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused.

I treasure my renewed contact with my old friend. But what is more important, I treasure the return of romance, passion, poetry, and beauty in my life.

Have you recently been awakened by a voice from the past? Please share with us!

Images to accompany this blog