Nothing like visiting your family to take stock of everything, personal, political and in between. I ventured up to Santa Rosa on Friday for my niece's high school graduation, that time check fact alone reason for pause. My sister was pregnant with this niece at my wedding, and I've lived several lifetimes since. And of course, sitting playing catch with your nephew and eating with my sisters and trying to figure out with my brother why we'd blocked out our own graduation, put me right back into some of the initial chapters. Ouch, I say! The graduation was at once sweet — all those young lives launching into the world! My beautiful young niece! — and troubling: why was the principle harping about the inherent dangers of a world with equally powerful countries? Why was I the only one cheering at the mention of Obama's name? So I came home to how I've made it, only an hour away from the suburbs but oh so different: rocking out with my SF band mates, walking an artist couple's big dog around Mission Bay, meeting a friend for lunch @ Bar Bambino (yum), practicing yoga with the ever-questing Ashtangis, and revisited my favorite venerable authors and artists, taking notes on how to be graceful about it all:
"A mosaic is a conversation between what is broken," — Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World
"It is something—it can be everything—to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.” — Wallace Stegner
"nobody left unbroken/nobody left unscarred/nobody here is talking/that's just the way things are/ — "Sister Lost Soul," Alejandro Escovedo
No comments:
Post a Comment