Each Alumnae remembers the unexpected compassion felt and shared on the side porch by the garden at Brookhaven Retreat. It is a place where friendships are born. Where the complexity of every woman’s journey becomes a healing force offered from one caring heart to another in an array as beautiful as any brilliant bouquet.
But before a flower’s rainbow can bloom a seed must fall. It must fall into the richness of the soil, and it must break from the weeping swell. The weeping swell pulls the roots deep to feed the life so tightly held. The life within cannot be confined but is drawn to a blossom’s glory by the warmth of a brand new morning.
So many I have seen come to the emergence of order through the river of tears, released, free and undammed, flowing beneath each starry night. Their searching contemplation is cast to unknown expanse beyond the clouds whose drifting motion cradles their emotions, having slipped through their hands.
But longings do not fall to the earth because of dissociations and disorders, so they look up and they look out beyond the grassy knolls, down the dividing path and share their dreams of hopes return.
They gaze through the gazebos to the silhouette’s mountain past the rolling pasture now covered in shadows, beyond the wooden bridge like peace over tumbling waters. With souls carved out as deep as the sky, they listen to the distant peacocks echo, calling to their unfolding hopes with a resounding “here!...here!” I’ve seen them “here!”
Yet, disenchantment must first find consolation to acrimonious disappointments… so they let go of sadness beneath the stars by the garden, one tear at a time.
