I received this message this morning from Becca, she sent me $30 towards the purchase of my  new monochrome camera:

“Your books and blog gave me hope in some of my darkest hours. As I watched your photography grow and the risks you took I felt a change in me and decided to work on myself and after much soul searching and honest hard work emotionally and financially I am in a better place. I am enjoying the new photos from your new camera. I hope this helps towards the camera or whatever you need it for. Many thanks, Becca.”

It is an extraordinary experience to be thanked for taking money from someone, there are those who grasp the beauty and meaning of it, and those who do not.  There are some who are drawn to generosity and some deeply fearful of it.  I know what she means, I feel the same way about her.

Becca and I are more alike than she perhaps knows, and we have a bond that cannot really be broken.

She was in a very dark place once, as I was, and she was brave and strong enough to choose a different story for herself. She found work, she found writing and photography, she found the love of her life, she is soon to get married. We were walking on parallel paths.

Becca did the hard and sometimes dirty work, she has unleashed the creative spark and her writing is beautiful and evocative, her photographs rich and warm. Her soul shines in the way of someone who has finally, after some time in the shadows, found a soulmate to share the crisis and mystery of the world.

When the awe and the zeal and the love and connection of the human mind, of the yearning to know, come together, a new sense of what it is to be human is awakened.  This is what I have learned, and I think she has learned: You must activate your own imagination, and learn to shed the fears and anger and cruelties and alarms of the wider world, no one can do that for you.

But once you do take the risk and the leap of faith, then one doorway after another opens up, a rich feast of possibility. There is  always the possibility of fiasco, always the chance of bliss – hope instead of despair, light instead of darkness, love instead of loneliness, compassion in the place of anger.

You have found your zeal, entered your authentic life, answered the call to adventure, opened up to new and rich experience. Revolution doesn’t have to do with tearing something down, it has to do with bringing something forth. This is Becca’s gift to me, and to the world.