By Jean P. Kelly

I WALKED FOR the first time into a multi-day ecumenical faith festival on my own, not knowing a soul and unsure what to expect as a newcomer. Within 15 minutes of arriving, I met a fellow podcaster, then her son, then her brother and by the end of the day I was part of their friends & family group enjoying a musician on stage. Throughout the next three days all were reliable companions, bearing out what I had heard about the authentic hospitality offered annually at the Wild Goose Festival. As one veteran attendee told me “I always make friends I don’t even know I need.”

Just a few days before I drove six hours to North Carolina, a friend of more than 30 years ghosted my invitation to dinner. A voicemail left for another long-time buddy during my return drive likewise went unanswered. That neither was an anomaly, yet I persisted in my attempts to connect, was all the proof needed to affirm how much easier it is to preach detachment than to practice it. My talk at the festival about the importance of establishing boundaries with loved ones, based on my book, Less Helping Them, More Healing You, concluded with a quote from a favorite spiritual teacher, Fr. Anthony DeMello: “When I die to the need for people, then I am right in the desert…. It is solitude, it is aloneness, and the desert begins to flower.”

But being on the receiving end of detachment felt like disloyalty at worst and indifference at best. That desert flower had thorns, which would seriously wound if I allowed myself to descend into self-pity.

Anyone who has gone through a major life transition—career change, divorce, death of a partner, addiction recovery or gender identity change—understands the deep sadness caused when dear ones don’t accompany us along a new path. When friends drop us, even the pragmatic realization that all things have a season—even love—is cold company indeed. The temptation is to look back with analysis and regret or forward with distrust of new relationships. I heard once that lingering too long in either the past or the future is a temptation of the Evil One, because both rob us of radical presence, even if the present moment happens to be a sad one.

As I waited in vain for a returned call or text, I couldn’t help but think of Mark’s Gospel heard at Mass just hours before starting my drive back to Ohio. “Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet,” Christ instructed the apostles, sent out two-by-two to share the love and beauty of his teachings. Like them, I continued my journey, buoyed by three days of joy, acceptance, and affirmation of my mission to teach others that they are beloved by God. My companions for this expedition of the heart were new friends made at the Wild Goose Festival.

I pondered also how my momentary sadness might serve a purpose: to make room in my life for something I did not yet understand. As the Sufi spiritual master Jalaleddin Rumi once wrote, sadness “violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

My confidence slowly returned as the highway carried me closer to home. Far better things—and friends—were on the horizon, I believed, because fresh green leaves were already growing in my heart. I made the decision then to return to the Wild Goose Festival next year, in order to nourish my new friendships and cultivate even more, especially those I don’t know that I need.

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