Reach

The love of another makes growth meaningful, desirable. It magically powers the effort of transformation. Take the sunflower. She pulls away from the wall and reaches for her full height, inwardly impelled in response to the sun’s favor.

I'm no longer fascinated by my expansion for my own sake, any more than my son is interested in doing fractions and word problems. What’s the point? I got my degrees and my awards, and I learned that I am, after all, still pretty small.  I’m a temporary rush of membraned energy, a phlegmy speck in an unfathomable universe of coherent complexity. I simply can’t

Purim

In the biblical story of Queen Esther with my son at bedtime. In the tale, Esther has been quite incredibly hidden within the most intimate folds of the royal Persian court, drowsed in perfect security and privilege at a time when her exiled people were a vulnerable minority in the empire. When a bitter nobleman succeeds in having the Jews slated for public annihilation, Esther’s decision to own and make public her identity, was laden with risk. Her boldness could have cost her her life with nary a blink from King Xerxes. True, within hours her immediate enemy Haman is hung on the grisly gallows he himself erected – as my son said, “That was a twist.”  But interestingly, what Esther gains from the king when she lays her life on the line is NOT peace or victory or security. Rather, she wins permission to fight on the approaching day of massacre. This is Purim. It is kind of a story about permission to fight, permission to violently break against the edicts set against you. What do you need to fight for? Who do you need permission from? Sometimes even in just asking to fight, we face death. What is worth perishing for?

Lean on Me

Life is interdependence. Each of us came into the world attached to another human being by an umbilical cord. Right now, I’m inhaling what the bushes outside my house exhaled and they’ll take in that CO2 and give me more of what I need. On Thursdays, I drop my son and a girlfriend’s daughter off at tennis; then she picks up these kids and brings my son home to my husband while I drive her daughter and mine to choir on the other side of the island. Life works better together.

Move

As a veteran human being (I was born before 1980), I accept that to live is to move. It's how well we anticipate, relish, and sometimes recover from the push and draw of this motion that largely influences our quality of life.

I have two small-sized human beings living with me. They look like my husband and myself, but they are their own giant entities. They blow my mind with their creativity, fry my circuits with their energy and push me into the turbulent unknown. They are a daily tide that I’ve learned to anticipate, ride and recover from. Three cups of Peets coffee a day, baby.