The Family Of Things

You do not have to be good

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

 

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

 Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain 

are moving across the landscapes

over the prairies and the deep trees

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place
in the family of things. 

-Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
photos: Rome 2013

*     *     *      

It's the best of times, and the worst of times. Everyday we're tugged this way and that by the stories of tragedy, heroism and helplessness. Some of us are just baking our way through the lockdown, or sitting numbly, waiting for release, or November, or both; or all of the above. Then there are the protesters who can't or won't stay home. It's tough for everyone. So we sew face masks and wash our hands and keep on standing six feet apart at the grocery. Or not because maybe we're still going to work everyday, one of the 'everyday heroes' though paid less than heroically and likely without health insurance. Sometimes I feel stupid because who knows, maybe the conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers were right after all, and I worry that I didn't even bother to find out what they were yelling about on youtube. Like maybe we should have been digging bunkers after all instead of following make-up tutorials or dancing on tiktok.  But nevermind all that. Here I offer the wonderful Mary Oliver to keep on reminding us its going to be okay. And what better series to pair her poem with than these photos from a trip to the beautiful Eternal City? Ah Rome, indeed it was nice to remember how I veni'd and vidi'd, but this city and its living breathing stones arranged in marvels of cathedral, tomb and bloodlust amphitheater definitely still vici's me. Totus tuus :)

a new year

vendor, Frederiksted, St. Croix  2016

Happy New Year! In St Croix last week at a J'ouvert festival and huge steel drum bands played while people ate and danced, and everywhere you turned there was more to be seen. But amidst all that, this man in his sandal stall with his wistful dreaming eyes stayed with me the most. I'm back in Chicago now but I wish him and all of us a happy 2016!

a kind of clarity

"There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you'd forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible."
 - Nicole Krauss, Great House

chinese checkers

Columbus Park
new york city, 2012

I watched the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer" on Netflix recently--about a young chess prodigy who gets his start playing against the chess hustlers in Washington Park in New York City--and I remembered these photos I took one December day in New York when a ride on the wrong train took me to Columbus Park which is nestled right up against NYC's Chinatown. Everyone was playing cards or chinese checkers--or some version of checkers and chess as I know---and no one seemed to mind the fact that it was pretty cold outside to be sitting in the park playing games like it was in the middle of summer instead of December....