A winter gone away

I am so glad to be here.

Well, truth be told, I'm not really glad to be HERE, in Southern Ontario, where, despite the lovely spring temperatures making promises to weary souls, there's still a lot of snow on the ground. Not here here but here, on sparkpeople!

I had a strange and glorious winter in a beautiful beach cottage 100 feet from the Gulf of Mexico. It was an unusually warm and sunny February, ( or so the locals said), and I lapped it up like a cat with a dish of cream. A dreamy place and time and 6 weeks of it!

The strange thing was that the promised internet connection never materialised and the cottage's owner had neglected to have phone service hooked up before jetting away to some exotic place.

Sit for a minute with me and try, (this might take Herculean effort), if you even can, to think about 6 weeks without a phone or internet. Okay - stop hyperventilating - it was amazing.

I did have school commitments that demanded a phone line so I was able to use the rental agent's line as necessary and Starbucks is a good go to place for a hit of wifi with your java, but, for the most part, we were in a quiet place of solitude for 6 weeks.

What would you do with this gift? For a gift it was. Without google and facebook and sparkpeople and gmail and linkedin and twitter and... it was a quieting of the mind like no yoga class could ever hope to achieve.

I thought some deep thoughts - and tried to share some of them with my DD whose recovery from her devastating illness has been steady and true. Borders 50% off everything blowout provided a huge cache of books which I read in peace and without interruption. I studied. I walked endless miles on the beach and talked to gulls. After the first week, we stopped turning on the television and started going to bed early. I slept. It was a glorious gift.

And now it is suddenly over. And I need it to be - the pace had slowed to an unsustainable crawl and I feared I might stop to exist beyond the limits of the beach, the porpoise, the sand and the sun.

So, I'm happy to be HERE - reconnecting - benefitting from the awe inspiring wisdom of my friends! Sharing my tidbits of insights, catching up with people's lives. Because whatever gifts solitude brings, connection multiplies it by a hundred and gives even more.

I look forward to catching up!