Scenes mediated by my emotions often feel like this picture: a familiar place painted unfamiliar colors making familiar and alien share the same space in me.
I didn’t end up taking many pictures this week, a combination of rainy days spent inside writing and a weekend at an indoor water park. Side note: I did indeed destroy my kids in side-by-side slide races. It’s my duty as their father. So, instead of my best photos, here are thoughts that spent the week circling in my head:
1. Weird confluences are not so much strange as they are just a part of life. Doing some research for an essay, I found that one of the longest and most severe droughts in California history began the same year I stopped sleeping and started accruing a sleep deficit that’s still with me. This seems…poetic.
2. I am still firmly committed to the idea that any structure or system that seeks to consolidate power for the few at the expense of the many should be torn down and replaced, including the ones within ourselves.
3. We do forgiveness wrong here because we make it transactional and predicated on the person who needs to be forgiven doing something to earn it based on our personal scale of their worthiness (h/t to Marcus Halley on Twitter for this thoughtful thread). I keep thinking about how this plays out in parenting and education where we so often teach grace as needing to be earned when that makes it anything but grace.
4. Two of my kids had birthdays within seven days of each other, one turning 16 and the other 8. Both had special celebrations: a trip to see Wicked for my daughter and a day of water slides and overstimulation at the Great Wolf Lodge for the other. The best part of both was watching the two of them (and their brother with the June birthday) share the excitement of each celebration with their siblings and extended family. Reminded me that the brief season with them in my house must be built on shared time and spending the big moments with each other.
5. Nothing triggers my impatience more than trying to write my stories. Pushing that rock daily up the hill is radical meditation and I need to cultivate the ability to sit with the moments where I am left at a loss for how to proceed.
6. I still dislike the New England Patriots.
That’s it. Not so much profound as where I find myself, though those two need not be mutually exclusive. Until next week, then…
writing after sunsets 