At the end of the year, an elusive sense of commmunity on the healing path

This is my 21st episode to help cast off 2021. I feel it is fitting to look back on the years behind me, my healing and overcoming of ulcerative colitis and regard my journey through the lens of community, my closeness and distance to it. In this episode I discuss the sense of camaraderie I encountered in the company of classmates, co-workers and colleagues in the various places I studied and the jobs I worked.  While I have healed through connecting with my higher self and heart, the fuller sense of community has always remained elusive. This episode is bittersweet as I remember the good souls that helped guide and change my perspectives on life changing matters. I am grateful and sometimes wistful. Otherwise...otherwise... I wish everyone a happy and wondrous New Year. We all deserve it. Thank you for listening. 

Над вечным покоем (Above Eternal Peace), 1894, Isaac Levitan

I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;
And send imagination forth
Under the day's declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.

W. B. Yeats - excerpt from ‘The Tower’

Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea), 1810, Caspar David Friedrich - Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Old lecher with a love on every wind,
Bring up out of that deep considering mind
All that you have discovered in the grave,
For it is certain that you have
Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing
Plunge, lured by a softening eye,
Or by a touch or a sigh,
Into the labyrinth of another's being;

W. B. Yeats - excerpt from ‘The Tower’

Тишина (Silence), 1898, Isaac Levitan