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Dear Friends, I want to tell you about the month of March. It began, as many of my best stories do, with an excellent intention that got completely out of hand. Some of you may have seen my Facebook post about the scarf project. For weeks, my beautiful home office, the sanctuary where I write and dream and do my Morning Magic, had disappeared entirely under an avalanche of scarves. Hundreds of them, silky and colorful and hopelessly tangled, spread across every surface in cheerful defiance of any system I tried to impose. They were to become gifts, you see, part of my Love Letters Global Movement (www.LoveLetters.Love), and I had imagined myself gliding through the sorting and gifting process like a woman who has her life together. Instead, I sat in my recliner playing FreeCell. I wrote about it on Facebook because I could not resist the irony: Diana von Welanetz Wentworth, author of books that recommend “voluntary simplicity,” buried alive in her own generosity. I finally threw them all back in storage containers to sort some other time. My friends found it very funny. I found it only somewhat funny. But I wrote about it because that is what I believe in, the telling of the true story, the one with the mess still in it. And then came my birthday. March 4th arrived and I was not well. A series of events had me genuinely under the weather. My dearest friend of 43 years, Mary Kelly, had decided to make the journey from Palm Springs, hiring a driver to bring her all the way to Thousand Oaks for just one night. I called it off. I could not bear the thought of her making that enormous effort for a birthday that felt, honestly, rather gray. My daughter Lexi said, “Don’t worry. We will have a nice dinner.” And so I let myself feel the small sadness of a birthday that was not what I had hoped, and I moved through it. That is something I have learned at 85: you do not have to perform cheerfulness. You are allowed to simply feel what you feel, and trust that life has more to say on the subject. Oh, did life have more to say. What I did not know, what I had absolutely no idea was happening, was that Lexi was quietly, methodically, and with enormous love, planning everything. She was making phone calls. Coordinating schedules. Keeping secrets. Weaving together the kind of surprise that requires both organizational genius and a very good poker face, neither of which I knew she was hiding. On Saturday evening, March 14th, I came home from a full day out to find Lexi arranging white daisies (her late father’s favorite) and pink roses. “Dad and I want to re-create your birthday!” A few minutes later, the doorbell rang, and there was Mary Kelly walking into my living room with a suitcase. Mary, who I had cancelled. I simply stared at her. And then I laughed. And then, if I am honest, I cried just a little. The next morning we went to our beloved spiritual center, New Thought Now, and then to a favorite restaurant beside the lake. I thought I knew what was coming. I did not know anything. Waiting at the table, wearing ridiculous hats, were Sharon Lindsay, Nita Alvarez and Lauren Ballas, three of the original luminaries of the Inside Edge from its very first days in 1985, dear and cherished friends for forty years. And then, most astonishing of all, Tim Piering, my closest male friend and soul brother, who had come from Sedona. Tim, who has known me since the earliest days of everything. Tim, who always makes me laugh until I cannot breathe. We told chicken jokes. I am not going to apologize for that. It was a Mad Hatter party, because of course it was. Mary had tucked quotes inside small golden eggs scattered across the table, and we each cracked one open and shared how that particular quote was speaking to exactly where we are in our lives right now. It was the kind of conversation that feels like church, the real kind, where people tell the truth and recognize themselves in each other. And Lexi. My extraordinary daughter had also gifted me the most exquisite rose quartz angel, along with tender love notes nestled inside plastic golden eggs. I held that angel and I thought: this is what love looks like when it takes a form you can hold in your hands. I forgot, in all my astonishment and delight, to do what I always do at gatherings of beloved people. I forgot to go around the table and speak to each person about what they mean to me and share the stories only some of them know. I was simply too full of joy to think of anything but receiving. Each of them will get a proper love letter from me. That is a promise. But here is what I want to offer you today, the thing I keep turning over since that luminous afternoon by the lake: Life corrects itself. Not always on our schedule. Not always in the form we expected. But the love that is meant for us has a way of finding us, even when we have called it off, even when we are sitting in our recliners surrounded by scarves, even when we feel too tired and too unwell to expect very much. Expect magic anyway! That is still my answer. After 85 years, after everything. Expect magic anyway, because sometimes your daughter is already on the phone making it happen. With all my love and a heart still glowing,
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