Comes The Night

Comes the night, the late midnight hours, and for just a while, I feel better than in any of my other waking hours. I lie on my bed, propped up by pillows and teddy bears. My mood is light. My mind is alert. My creativity is just below the surface.

For a few brief hours, I almost feel so good that I can pretend I am not extremely ill. I can just imagine that I am resting and readying myself for sleep after a day full of activity, the way life used to be.

I go to my nightly haunt, my time on Farm Town. Such a silly game, really. Seeding virtual crops. Constructing virtual buildings. Planting lovely flowers. Harvesting. Fishing. Milking the cows. Gathering the wool. Living a busy life, as I can no longer do. I am losing the ability to stand, and long ago, some 20 years ago, I lost the strength and endurance to do physical work.

I now have eight farms, whereas in real life I have almost nothing, not even a car. As my Farm Town friend from Turkey once said, "In Farm Town, the weather is always good.....never too hot.....never too cold. No problems. Everything is good in Farm Town."

Farm Town has an interactive element to it. It took me awhile to find it, but now, it has changed my life.

I take my avatar, Peggy-Sue, to the marketplace and get hired to work for other people. At least that was how it started. Someone hires me to harvest or plow or chop trees. etc. They take me to their farm, and I earn experience points which allow me to progress to a higher level.

When I first entered the marketplace, I was silly. I would have Peggy-Sue say silly things, usually singing snippets of songs......."Hi Ho, Hi ho, it's off to work I go" or "I whistle while I work...". One night another avatar said, "Well, I fart while I work." And here was a bunch of about 15 avatars with little cartoon shapes saying "LOL". I could not stop laughing.

Farm Town allows you to chat with people on your farms. Most people would just hire me and thank me when I was done. Then I timidly tried something new when I sense that the other person was friendly. "I am from Rochester, New York, USA. Do you mind my asking where you are from?" If they answered and added a little more, we would start to chat.

I am amazed at what happened in many of these "chats". I met many other people, mostly women, but not all, who were very sick and only felt well in the middle of the night. Most of these people lived in the United States or Canada or Jamaica, so our time zones sort of meshed.

But I also began meeting other people. Because I was up in the middle of the night, I met people from all around the globe: the teacher of autistic children in New Zealand who was just starting her day; the young woman in the Philippines who just got a job working for Coca Cola and who helped her father make cookies for his modest business; the artistic teenager in Vietnam who just celebrated her 17th birthday; the very lonely woman in Tanzania who struggles with no one understanding her fight against lupus; the single mother who is an amazing oil painter in Istanbul; the woman in Oslo whose second marriage was to her penpal in Scotland; the husband and wife in Brisbane, Australia who worked on rescuing animals from the zoo when they had the terrible floods recently; the teacher near Melbourne, Australia who wants to call me on the phone or talk to me on Skype so we can get to know each other better -- and tell jokes; my friend in southwestern Virginia who met her second husband, who lived in England at the time, through a word game on the Internet.

These are the ones I can think of at this moment. I know there are more.

There are other amazing friendships that have developed through Facebook. I am very close to a single mom in South Africa who is an activist like I was when I was a pastor of a church. She read an article I wrote about gratitude in the Gratefulness.org newsletter, and asked to write to me. Because we are friends and comment back and forth on each other's post, several of her friends have asked to be friends with me.

One of these is a young woman stuck without a job, living with her parents who are just barely getting through each day with no help, as her father is dying of cancer. One night, when I started chatting with her, she said she was very depressed. Then she went on to tell me she was thinking of killing herself. I kept chatting with her, while contacting my good friend who lives in the same city and knows this young woman well. My single parent activist friend ended up calling up the young woman who suicidal and finding a way to meet with her. How, how, how....is something like this possible? This was a deeply spiritual experience.

There is the young man in Chenai, India, who knows he should marry soon, but who dreams to be a filmmaker. I told him all about my summer in India as an exchange student when I was 17, so he knows I am very interested in India. He calls me Aunty and asks me for advice on life.

In the middle of one night, I was chatting with a woman whom I thought lived in California. She was having an asthma attack and could not get help. I spent two hours talking to her while she tried to get through this. Then she sent me a note. "It is wonderful to know that people really care about other people and that someone reached out to help me, even from the other side of the globe." It turned out that she lives in Australia.

I subscribe to the Dalai Lama postings, as I love to read his words and learn about his travels. One night, they showed photos of him in Sarnath, India. I visited Sarnath the summer I lived in Varanasi. It is the place where Buddha first preached. I wrote several comments about how happy it made me to see those photos and remember being there.

Within two minutes I had a friend request. I thought the name might be Hindi. I accepted the request. It turned out that this young man is from Nepal, has studied Sanscrit, and works in Katmandu. We chat almost every single night, sometimes about simple things, but mostly about the meaningful things in life: kindness, spirituality, acceptance, serving others......I could go on and on. We learn from each other. We always greet each other with "Namaste". He calls me "Madam Mary Lou" because he says he is "small" compared to me and not nearly so wise.

I do not have words adequate for these experiences. My friend in New Zealand, with whom I talk almost daily, is from Christ Church and has lived through the devastation of two earthquakes within six months. One of my friends in the USA is a truck driver's wife, who is taking care of a very sick father and an aging mother. My friend in northern California is dealing with her mother's Alzheimer's and comes on Farm Town and talks to me, as she talks to almost no one else.

There are two women in California who I met on Farmville, and with whom I became close. For one, it was that we had diabetes in common. Then when her good friend took his own life, I reached out to her, as I had been through this several times and tried to support her, as she supported his family. Last summer, she came to the next county to see her dying grandmother. My friend drove in here so that we could have five hours together. It was wonderful.

The other close friend in California is just a little older than I am. When we first became friends, I read through her profile, and noticed with great sadness that one of her children had died. I wrote to her about this, and she wrote back, saying no one had never even noticed it before. That beautiful young man had killed himself, and this woman was struggling. I learned about her pain, and she learned about the pain of my illness. We talk about faith and life and care very much about each other. We hope so much to meet someday. There is a spiritual bond between us.

Sometimes, in the wee hours of the morning, I can almost pretend that I am not physically ill. But it is in the middle of the night, when I chat back and forth with so many people from so many walks of life, that I feel most fully alive. I know God walks between us. I know that distance is a matter of measurement -- but in the heart, there is no distance at all.

Every early morning, when I finally shut down the computer, I almost always say goodnight to two women: the one in New Zealand and the one in southwestern Virginia. "Have a good night's sleep." "Cya tomorrow." "Sweet dreams".

These hours of grace are such a gift in my life. They have changed me. I am more at peace. I am more alive.