I had come to the Berkshires for the healing of my heart, recently broken with the loss of a long-time love. I came as close as a whisper to refusing the invitation, which arrived in the middle of the single week I managed to carve out for myself during the long summer of grief and might have been put to better use at home, in the work of promoting my new book. However, it came from an old friend whose compassion lifted me above desolation on several occasions earlier in my life. The intermission in our friendship had been too long, and it was time to be together again. Yearning to part the river of grief, longing to find myself in connection once again, I said yes, My broken heart argued madly for the practical, likely for the purpose of diverting me from what was real and therefore difficult to tolerate for long; yet something deep in my spirit overrode the argument to follow the life-affirming impulse to"yes!"

I pushed myself to an exhausted edge in order to finish everything that had to be done so I could throw my bag in the car and head south, then west, from the coast of Maine to the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts. Stuck in gridlock on the Mass Pike, cars creeping at ten miles an hour, bumper to bumper for miles ahead and behind, I nearly regretted my decision. The plan had been for us to meet at Jaob's Pillow, the renowned Dance Center in the Berkshires, for the highly anticipated premiere performance of a gifted Chinese choreographer. From there, we would return to my friend's home, spend a brief day together, and then she and her husband would head back to their busy Boston lives while I stayed on for four more days of stillness retreat.

None of us bargained for gridlock. An hour into the creep-along traffic, I knew I'd never make the start of the dance performance; with wind at my back, I might arrive in time for the second half of the show. After a second interminable hour of inching along in the heat of the August day, the highway abruptly opened up, diverting significantly more than half of the cars in the direction of New York and Pennsylvania while the rest of us picked up the pace and pushed on into the mountains. Along with dozens of others stuck in the same nightmare of traffic, I reached the dance center ten minutes after the performance had started. Weary travelers all, we were informed we could not enter the theater until intermission. I had my ticket in hand and forty minutes to fill, not a difficult dilemma on the beautiful Jacob's Pillow grounds.

I wound my way to the tea garden, where I remained alone for quite some time, admiring the many flowers still in bloom. I wondered about my other late-arriving companions (nowhere to be seen) even as I relished the beauty of the gardens and the stillnesss of being alone. Suddenly, I was not alone. A young Asian man stepped into the gardens with me. Never speaking or even nodding in my direction, he paced the perimeter of the garden, stooping once to right the stem of a bent flower. He moved with fluid grace, re-positioning the broken stem as if uttering a prayer. He raised his arms to the heavens, entreating the gods of the tea garden for favor in some matter, I knew not (and longed to know) what.

Precisely at that moment, the audience in the theater erupted in applause and cheers. The first performance---I later learned the longer and more complex of the two---ended as the cheers and delighted laughter of the audience swelled higher, and higher still. The young man, whose arms were still pointed toward heaven, brought his hands together in front of his heart, bowed and rolled onto the ground in an explosion of delicately choreographed movements that could only be described as pure joy. In a flash of recognition, I realized that I, a woman sitting alone in the quiet tea garden, had served as witness to something no one in the theater audience would see: Shen Wei, the choreograper, awaiting the audience response to his artistic creation.

Stillness gave me the gift of that moment. The stillness of gridlock on the highway, the stillness of my own peace of mind accepting the inevitable delay and locating my pleasure in some other way than what I thought I had come to experience, the stillness of the lovely tea garden, the stillness of the choreographer's prayers to the gods of beauty and dance.

There are some things we miss when preoccupied by what we believe is meant to happen, things we miss by being too busy, things we miss when we are so easily distracted from what is presented to us here and now, not always obvious as a gift.

Two delicious days of conversation and connection later, my friends Joan and Julian were hurriedly packing the car for their return to the city. Politely excused from an offer to help, I once again retreated to a garden. I no sooner settled myself in a comfortable chair facing the hillside of wild and cultivated flowers when a cobalt blue dragonfly perched upon my arm. There it sat, undisturbed, as I marveled at his delicate splendor. I twitched my arm; it flew away. Minutes later, it returned, flew away and returned again. We were to repeat this dance of wild and domesticated creature each day I was there.

"Hello, little friend," I spoke in silence as my friends banged through the house and called to each other, "Honey, have you got the checkbook? Did you remember to show her how to operate the pool heater? Do we need our Pyrex pans here or there?" Too distracted to notice, they forged on with their necessary tasks as I delighted in the blue dragonfly who could have landed anywhere in a garden as vast as a small city park, but instead came to rest on my arm.

They left blowing hugs and kisses from the car, promising a next visit sooner rather than later. The stillness deepened along with my attention to the minutiae of a day shimmering with magnificence. I turned once: there was my dragonfly, now lit upon the ruffled petal of a striking yellow daylily.

Yellow lily, blue dragonfly, healing heart. Somewhere in there, a visual haiku: the gift of standing still long enough to honor the beauty of the natural world and to lift my heart to the heavens in grateful prayer.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Meredith Jordan,

wow! I have just found you and am delighted with your writing! What a joy to witness this dancer's joy! What a divine privilege! You encourage me, thank you!