Gratitude from the Comfy Red Couch

There's no place I'd rather be on a Saturday afternoon than sitting on the Comfy Red Couch drinking coffee, listening to music, talking about nothing and everything with my fellow commune-mates. It's such a simple joy, being surrounded by people you love who love you back for exactly who you are. It's an enormous gift that I'm counting my blessings for day after day.

With 80 days until our Epic Bike Journey, the little things, which are really the biggest things in my life, are sketching themselves like a smiling profile against a blanketing blue sky. Brunches, dinners, chocolate chip cookies, the simple act of cleaning the kitchen, spontaneous art projects and dance parties and times we exclaim, "Yes!" to each other's wildest dreams. I'm sitting back, watching this masterpiece re-create itself over and over again, feeling immense gratitude to be part of something so beautiful.

I'm holding onto the beauty, these days especially, as we brush up against the end of an era--and the beginning of new a new one. What's to come for us, post-commune, post-Sunday Couch Sits? It's a mystery. Really. So much is unknown. But I know it's bound to be daring, bound to involve risk, and sure to shape our souls for the better. We will survive and we will thrive, because that's who we are. We show up big for this thing called Life. We step into the terror and the comfort and we hold it all with gratitude for simply being so.

These past 2 years at the Green Vine Co-op has healed my need for a certain kind of home, a certain kind of community, a certain kind of being known. And this past year, when my closest friends on earth decided that nothing mattered more than being in the same space, I was opened again to the greatest kinds of joy and power. I walked alongside believers, possibilitiarians, hopefuls, and doers. I stood in a puddle of Love. And Joy sat with us on the Comfy Red Couch because it had nowhere else to go and nothing else that mattered nearly as much.

It's true that I've got a lump of Terror in my throat over our bike trip. Who wouldn't? This is no sane or stable undertaking. It's a dream. A possibility. The result of saying Yes to that crazy look in the other's eyes. And--it's actually going to happen. Most of my biggest fears are highly manageable, but some are more like lingering truths that I'm sure will eventually surface: I'll get jaded on the road, I'll miss my friends, I'll be tired and rundown and eventually get sick, I'll go insane, I'll want to quit 2 weeks in. The big fears of either of us dying or getting seriously injured seem less real, less likely. But they're there, too.

Yesterday, on the Comfy Red Couch, we whispered our fears in between our thank you's. We took more time between sentences to just sit and be together. We felt the power and the joy of what we'd created. Something as simple and strong as tribe. Something as necessary as breathing.

And gratitude found its way into my shortened breaths, pulling them out with hope, elongating them with knowing: we chose to create this tribe once, we can chose it again. We can.