Driving through West Virginia with three colleagues from Pittsburgh we alternate
driving, talking, eating, and napping. The GPS indicated it’s a 9+ hour drive to our
retreat center destination in North Carolina.
No worries though because we have
brought enough snacks to ward off starvation should we get lost in the hills or
waylaid by the road construction.
The view from our car windows is sometimes luscious green hills, sometimes sky
and panoramic cloudscape. Once we get the radio functioning, we hum and sing
along to the country and western music that is a specialty of the region. But the best
part is the conversation and the amazing connections. One friend describes going to
a documentary film about Toni Morrison’s life and mentions how Toni wrote of how
grateful she was for “friends of mind.”
This brought back to me an exchange I had had the day before with a colleague over
Zoom, followed by our text messaging. In our Zoom conversation, we had been
exploring ideas to help me improve my website. Later in the afternoon, my colleague
texted me a suggestion that had come to her while riding her bicycle. I texted back,
“I’m so grateful to have the use of your beautiful mind to help me with my creative
projects.”
Down the road a bit I decided to begin typing some reflections on a project my
improv troupe and I did last week. I typed, “To the body, feelings are just sensations,
often uncomfortable until we give them names. Within minutes of my having
written this, my friend LaVerne, who was sitting next to me in the back seat leaned
across the car to show me a meme she had just discovered on her Facebook page.
“I sat with my anger long enough till she told me her real name, Grief.”
It took a bit longer than the GPS predicted, but we arrived safe and sound to the
InterPlay Leader’s Gathering in the Smoky Mountains. A community of “friends of
mind” greets us. We will move and play together, changing our bodies to change our
minds, and visa versa. With the support of one another, we will redo in our bodies,
the effects of toxic socializations around race, gender, and the processes of grief.
How lucky I feel to have so many playmates that are “friends of mind.”
How about you? Where do you find your “friends of mind?”
Sheila
