It'll Come

Something changed about the third day I was at the ashram.

I stopped trying to figure out what to do and realized it’s OK to just be.

It’s OK to sit on the beach and laugh with a stranger – no, a new friend.

It’s OK to sit on a bench just to look at the water.

It’s OK to walk with nowhere to go. No plans for the day.

Things will unfold as they should.

I finally got it, and it was time to go home.

The early morning before I was to leave I had a bad dream.

I was with another person and she was on one side of a conflict, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

She and I needed to get from her side to the other side and the only way over was on a boat with five soldiers from the other side.

But they didn’t look like soldiers.

They had scary, white and black make-up on their faces. They were dressed all in black and they stood on the side of the boat armed with guns pointed down at us as we cowered in a corner on the floor of the boat.

We knew they wouldn’t shoot us if we didn’t say the wrong words, and everyone knows what the wrong words are, but I was so panicked, I couldn’t remember the difference between the wrong words and the right words.

The soldiers were laughing, oblivious to why we were so scared. The wrong words weren’t a secret.

What was I afraid to come home to?

When I was leaving new people were coming in.

One girl caught my eye.

She looked sad. Like she was trying to extract some happiness from her surroundings, but she couldn’t connect.

Just wait, I thought.

It’ll come.