Grace on Leaving the Stow Building

Entry for 1 August 2008:

Yesterday on leaving work I felt a sense of profound grace, of giving and having been given much, of rightness and lightness. I experience this from time to time, when suddenly everything seems well and meaningful and what it is. In this case, I was beginning a long August holiday and felt liberated, a sense of space opening up after a very intense time of conferences, training and administrative efforts. In several contexts, as therapist, teacher and administrator, I had faced people dealing with difficult things, feeling overwhelmed by pain, fear, pressure of work. I had hung in there with them, in several cases long enough for glimmers of hope to begin to show through. As I reflect on it now, I wonder if it is this moment of emerging possibility, sometimes at the darkest point, that is the source of the feeling of grace that had come upon me.

Of course, grace can come to us anywhere, but it seemed to me in that moment that there was a sense of rightness in my being here, in this place, walking down the backstairs in the of the old Stow Building, that this is what we’d come to Scotland for. It may be easier to make space for this expansiveness on the eve of a vacation, but I’ve found that it can body forth at any moment, in any place.