girlfriends & deep talks
Over the weekend I spent some time with six of my best friends from my college years. The majority of us were teammates on the track team and our friendship blossomed during early morning workouts and Sunday long runs. Three years ago as we were going into our 30th year earth side we organized a reunion trip to celebrate our friendship and our lives thus far.
This past weekend marked our third anniversary of the trip. Each year we pick a destination in the PNW and get together for a weekend of gin & tonics, laughter, a couple workouts, sing alongs & winery tours.
This year we visited Vashon Island, a 15 minute ferry ride from Seattle, is a little slice of PNW rural island life. We stayed in a 1970's yurt inspired home with tons of personality and hit up some of the local attractions like an antique shop called Treasure Island, the local farmer's market, a community center Zumba class (where we double the participants and dropped the median age by 25 years) & Vashon Wines- highly recommend the last two.
On Saturday night our friend Meghan introduced what I will now coin as 'deep talks'. Meghan, always the facilitator, sat us down at the dining room table Saturday night after a few pours of vino and asked that we share one hope for the new year and one thing we want to let go of. We discussed love, loss, priorities, self value & esteem. It was so good to say things out loud, to verbalize our feelings and emotions. As a group we often email and text throughout the year. We see updates on facebook and instagram but rarely get to truly verbally communicate our news or dialogue our thoughts and feelings. These women that I think so highly of as beautiful, smart, confident and courageous reminded me how important it is to be vulnerable and have the space to react, respond and support each other.
This sounds like such a downer, but it was just about 30 minutes of the entire three day weekend. So don't worry, we had our fun too in the form of wine tastings, snapchats filters & the BEST triple creme brie on the planet.
These days we all work in different careers, are spread out around the west coast and are all at different, yet similar, life stages. Coming away from the weekend, what I appreciate most about this collection of ladies is the immediate laughter and relaxation that I find when we get together.
Thanks girlfriends.
xx ly