“What makes humility so desirable is the marvelous thing it does to us; it creates in us a capacity for the closest possible intimacy with God”

I can't really explain what it's like to live here.





More specifically, I can't explain what it's been like to live through the past 5 months.


I've lived through a vast shortage of assistants, numerous assistants coming and going, an incredibly (and I do mean incredibly) diverse team of assistants, many behavioural and interpersonal conflicts, many incidents that have resulted in a break down of trust and the list goes on and on and on... (and that's just in Orangedale.)





And tonight, Silas asked me what I had learned from it all.





I think that when I arrived here last September I wrote a list of all of the things I had discovered or learned in the short period of time that I had experienced L'Arche Cape Breton.





Certainly, this is not a final version (by any stretch of the imagination) but it perhaps attests to the fact that I am forever learning...

• It's all relative - friendship, love, time, patience
• It is possible to fall in love in the matter of a few short days... it is also possible to realize that the love you seek to feel for another person must always (and only ever) be the same love that you try to feel for all of humanity - it has nothing to do with "like"
• People will leave. They will not come back. They will go to exciting and interesting places. The dishes must still be done.
• Friendship comes in all shapes and sizes. It even (and especially) comes from the woman who bites her hand and spits at you and the woman who tells you to "Fuck off" every night before bed.
• We hurt the ones we love.
• No one tells you that during your early twenties you will experience the most excruciating inner turmoil that you have ever encountered. Or perhaps that was just for me.
• "I am in the world to change the world." But I am not necessarily in the world to save dying AIDS babies in Africa. Perhaps more importantly: "We can do no great things, only small things with great love." I may be here to make someone smile for half an hour, or celebrate a birthday, or share good conversation, or share no conversation at all - just share time.
• Removing myself entirely from all of the things that I love taught me about the things that I truly love and truly need.

• Much of it is all about the depth of living and recognizing simple abundance.