A significant number of people very dear to me have experienced the breakdown of a relationship in the past year or two. I have been witness to much sorrow, confusion, anger, hurt, mourning, and exhaustion. And I have also witnessed, sprouting up through all of that, glimmers of insight... resilience... hope... the clarifying of needs... sometimes for the first time in a lifetime. Over and over I am humbled by the power of the process itself. Over and over I am reminded that there is nothing to fix, no one to judge, and often nothing to even say. Sinking into the fertile composting of pain, seeds are sown which eventually sprout and blossom on their own inner time scale. In this I have faith. And meanwhile this witnessing stirs up in me ample grist for the mill of compassion. Old memories stirred up from the soil of my own relationship breakdowns, composted long ago.