A Different Goodbye

These days I am sorting through all my stuff and organizing what I will take with me and what gets thrown away, given away, or sold.  I came across a poem I wrote June 1976 after my graduation from high school at Woodstock in India.  I'd lived 12 years of my life in India, and knew it as "home".  Woodstock was an international boarding school where I'd spent most of those 12 years.  The intensity of living in the foothills of the Hymalayas 24/7 with your peers has lingered with me all these years.  I wrote this poem the last week before I left that beautiful place to return to the United States and a total unknown foreign future.  I was unable to formulate what lay ahead, what it would be like or feel like.  So the ache of leaving what I knew, and knowing that I could never really come back to it was heavy on my heart.  I wrote:

Strange be the heart of departure
To find you love with passions
So great that in leaving we see,
Ay, if I could but see them forever!
Not merely pictures and words
But better beings.
I feel I wouldn't know a heavy heart!
But life goes on and leaves my love behind.
My heart is bursting
Because "Goodbye" is mean and ugly.
Tears fill because I see beauty.
My soul cries because no light was seen
I loved them to the fullest
But wonder: did they love me for the best?

I have been back to visit twice (still way too long ago), and discovered it was true, I could never go back.  I had become an outsider to the place, and I'd lost touch with the people strewn all over the world.  Until around 2001.
Our class, the Class of 76, had its 25th reunion in Colorodo (USA).  Most of us had not  known where the others were for the past 25 years, and it was a glorious moment connecting with each other.  Since then many of us have stayed in touch, and now with Facebook, I've connected with others from our class and the school.  It really has been a balm to my woundedness expressed in this poem.  Because it was the people I was connected with in addition to the place.  And now in our global community, we who have wandered for decades, feeling still outside, have started to feel a "coming in" and reconnecting with the community that was and has been for us "home".

So today, as I say another goodbye (November 2010) to a place where I have lived for 20 years I share many of the same sentiments expressed in this poem. I still am at this place of having NO idea what the "Third Chapter" of my life will hold.  But it is no where near as sorrowful or remorseful (or perhaps as adolescent) a feeling.  Instead I say "Good-bye" with a sense that I can always come and visit and not feel so "outside", simply because I continue to be connected with the people, and the horizons of the place are now so much more expanded.   I also leave feeling that the goal of becoming "better beings" continues always, until HE returns!  I did my little part here and will continue to do it where ever I go.