TEN SLEEP

Have you ever wished you had a deeper sense of community around you? Or that you could reflect more light that you see, and that, too, could appear in your daily life?

As we wrap up the excerpts we’ve adapted from The Power of Connection work we’ve been posting the past couple of years – preparing for new posts in the new decade! – I share two pieces this month near to my heart – about the light we can all help shine in each other’s lives fairly easily…and that same light that we can receive…

I am just a stranger, passing through this small Wyoming town called Ten Sleep. Walking my dog one afternoon, I meet a woman also walking her dog. We chat for a while and I mention I am planning to hike the next day. She offers to go with me and suggests a couple of places. “Even if I’m not up to the distance,” she says, “you can go with my husband. He’s a game warden.”

She and her husband arrive the next day with full barbeque supplies: hamburgers, hot dogs, vegan burgers – “Though you’re in cow country, I don’t know if you eat meat,” the woman says. She’s also packed a key lime cheesecake, bottles of wine, water, and baggies individually wrapped for each of us with roasted soybeans, trail mix in another, a bag of dried mangoes. In the back of their truck rides companionship for Caleb, one of the eight dogs they have rescued from different parts of the region.

As we hike, Bev and Tom talk of their town. Bev tells of one of her friends who moved here and, at 42, had three strokes. “She’d been a real contributor, giver, and doer in the family,” Bev tells me. She and her husband still had two school-age kids. “People started – anonymously – dropping food at their door and money at their door. He lost his business during this time as well.” Bev went to see them one day and asked him, “How’s your wife today?” He started to weep. “All this kindness. All these people. I have no idea – how do I repay them?” Bev said, “Don’t. Just pay it forward.”

Bev recounts twice when they’ve had a fire at their house. Both times Tom wasn’t home. People “just showed up from all over the community and they just got to work, fighting this fire. People in the midst of it would say, ‘Oh, by the way, Hi, I’m so-and-so, and that’s my son and that’s my daughter. Over there is the science teacher.’ People would just pitch in.”

Bev tells me how good it feels to live in a community like this. “Even though everyone knows your business, you also know they’ll protect you.”

Later, Tom tells me he was born and raised in this area. He loves living here. It’s a place where no one is “judged by how much you have but by how hard you work and how well you treat your neighbor.”

I begin to imagine living in a place where “people will borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor and bake them a cake,” as Bev tells me. A place where you care about your neighbors, and they care about you. They ask how you are and want to hear the answer. 

And when I see a little boy skipping across the street in a ten-gallon hat, I’ll stop; I won’t go whizzing by. I might even pull over because I know him. I am watching him grow up. 

For some of us, being surrounded by trees, pastures, and golden light, it could be easier for our own light to shine through.

I dream of finding that light, wherever I travel, wherever I go. And that it follows me.

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Emmy winning-television producer, author/photographer and coach, Jillian (Robinson) Weaver loves sharing Experiences of the Heart – just for the joy of it❤️. For short daily doses, join her at https://www.instagram.com/jillianrobinsonweaver/.