Wonder Why?

Wonder Why?

Thursday night, I met Loren Stahl for dinner at Marco! Accepting that invitation and sharing a meal with a good friend is a big fucking deal, yet I forgot to write it down in my blog until today.

We sat at the bar and had a drink .  Then we ordered carpaccio with wafers of Parmesan curled on top of it and the most wonderful olive oil. We talked about Clint and his whacky sense of humor, which Loren shares. Loren was Clint's doctor, and mine, too, before he retired, and I don't know how to say how good he was to both of us. We laughed about Pink Panther movies and talked about the books Loren is reading and about poetry. The dinner actually inspired me to get out my copy of "Good Poems," and I am reading from it every night. Loren ate a tremendous steak for dinner and I picked at rigatoni Bolognese. It was good but didn't compare to the carpaccio, which I had eaten with bread and olive oil.

But the big question is: Why didn't I write about the experience that night or even the next day? I think it's very telling of the toxic habit I have developed of spending too much time on the negative and not enough on the good. Even after Rosemary's note with the wonderful Sufi proverb, "Break my heart so that love can flow more freely," I'm still slamming doors in the face of my own healing. On the surface that quotation sounds negative, but when I think it through, roll it around in my brain for a while, I can see the beauty of it. If I keep my broken heart sealed, the pain, the feeling of having been somehow cheated or punished, will never escape, and I will get sicker and sicker. This I know. This I understand. But I also understand how much work it will be. I keep saying that, and I also keep slipping back into my negative habits from time to time. It's hard to know when I am being too hard on myself and when I am not working hard enough. Confused? Me, too.