Sunday in CinCity. The "Three Things I Know About Life...It Goes On" Edition




The inauguration is going to happen. People are still sniping on Facebook trying to make points against someone else's equally polarized snipe. This administration might stay around for eight years or eight days. It all seems to be in the hands of a distractible circus juggler on a high wire.

 What will not change is that parents will still be taking walks with their children, helping them with homework, worrying about coming home late. We will still need to feed our families and to share our love. The hungry need food. The homeless need shelter. The sick need healing, the dying comfort. A government can make that easier or harder, a priority or an obstacle. What they cannot do is to make it disappear. Life will go on with all the daily minutiae and dramas that absorb us. Some of our jobs may be a bit harder with the changes we see coming. Sharing the American pie and dream may be made be more difficult. But, life will go on. How it goes depends on us. 

"Where do go from here? Chaos or community?" --Martin Luther King, Jr



"Later I sit below the bridge with my feet in the creek and the sun on my back. Reflected light flickers on the bridge's concave belly.

 A bridge between this and that, my side and yours, light and dark, past and future, what we can see and what we can't. A bridge like the new year when, it is said, the ancient gates are open between this year and the next, between who we've been and who we want to be. Students of the Kabbalah sing a folk songs with the words, ' All the world is just a narrow bridge. And above all is not to fear, not to fear at all.'

A child and her mother amble across the span barefoot. They pause to look down and listen to the falls. The mother carries four black shoes, two large and two small, with laces dangling. Across the bridge a young man lobs his red ball to a friend.

People stop in the middle, suspended, listen and look down into the creek. A man in a pink shirt with a blond toddler gestures toward the water, like all the mother's and fathers. 'See the fish?' he asks.

It's alive, this bridge, with the possibility of fish poems, bread-in-the-water poem, red football poem, casting-out-mistakes poem, tiny see-through-fly poem, brown-bottle-emptying-and-filling poem, damsel fly, woodpecker, acorn, oak, creek-rushing-to-the-ocean poem.

The last of our bread floats above quiet fish as I put on my shoes and walk home from the bridge."

from poemcrazy freeing your life with words by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge

painting by Gordon Lavender, Japanese Bridge over Koi Pond in Giverny


Comments

  1. "But, life will go on. How it goes depends on us...." So true. Thank you for being a calming voice in this heated time.

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  2. Well, I don't know of what that I'm all that calm. Still drinking the Pepto Bismol.;-)

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  3. My boss, of Syrian descent, has basically been freaking out ever since November 8th. She says she's just getting ready for the camps. Makes me SO ANGRY, that this bright, fabulous attorney BORN IN THE USA has to worry now.

    ReplyDelete

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Hey, thanks for your thoughts and your time:>)

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