Lunch With Jon And Ed

This is something I never thought I see.  Ed Gully and Jon walking down main street in Cambridge in the middle of the afternoon.

They weren’t arm-in-arm before I pointed the camera at them, but it turns out that these are two big men who aren’t afraid to hug each other or walk arm-in-arm.

Jon and I had lunch with Ed at the Round House Cafe yesterday, and this too wouldn’t have happened before Ed was diagnosed with inoperable brain tumors.   Since Ed stopped farming, he’s  figuring out how he really wants to spend his time.

Jon and Ed have both written about our lunch yesterday, and their evolving friendship.

One of the new things that I’ve noticed about Ed and can relate to in my own life is his new sense of freedom.

He talks about returning to that child-like place before the people and world around him began telling him who he was and what he was capable of.  It’s like he’s getting back in touch with that unspoiled place inside of him.

It makes me think of when Picasso said  “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

It’s about forgetting everything we think we know about ourselves, everything everyone has told us and seeing the world with the freshness of a child.

The sense of freedom that Ed talks about in his life now, reminds me of the sense of freedom I had when I got divorced.  For the first time in my life I felt like my life was my own.  And I began questioning everything I believed and thought I knew.

The real me, the one I had been hiding all my life, began to emerge.

It seems to me like there’s a new Ed emerging.  The one with the untainted child’s way of experiencing the world,  that had been tucked away for safe keeping, hidden by layers and layers of a lifetime.

I see it in him when we talk about art and creating.  In the way he explains how he thinks, his creative process and what he sees in his mind’s eye.

I’ve recently come to understand that  the “good” and “bad” in life go on simultaneously.  It’s not just one or the other.  There can  moments of beauty and love in the darkest times.  And even my best days have their low moments.

Ed is closer to the end of his life than he’s ever been, and yet, at the same time, seems to be awakening to a part of himself that he forgot existed.