Sunday 4 October 2009

At Extended Leadership Team this week, I mentioned that I was awake at 2.30am and had thought about other colleagues doing exactly what I was doing, hungering as I hungered, wondering as I wondered and unable to sleep and that we were all members of the 'Fellowship of the Fridge'. This is where that came from..

"Leftovers in their less visible forms are called memories. Stored in the refrigerator of the mind and cupboards of the heart.


These are just few of mine that came up tonight: the laughter of a friend, the last embers of a great fire, the long glance of love from my spouse from across a room full of people, an unexpected snowfall, the year everything went wrong and turned out right, and a chunk of poetry I learned in high school. These precious things - these leftovers from living on - remain to serve as survival rations for the heart and the soul. You can't entirely live off them. But life is not worth living without them.

My solitary late-night forays for food in the fridge are often garnished with such thoughts. I don't go to the refrigerator just to eat. But to think. To sort it all out. And sometimes I think about the other people who must be at the same place in their kitchen at this very moment, doing exactly what I'm doing, hungering as I hunger, wondering as I wonder. We will never get together. There will never be an international convention of us. No kitchen is big enough. But we are bound together. We make up the secret society of the Fellowship of the Fridge. Somehow muddling through and getting by. And not really as alone as we often think we are, after all."
Robert Fulghum

On yet another night when my mind is refusing to let me sleep, I wonder who else is out there.
Chris

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