I visited 47E at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Labor Day. It’s been over two decades since my last visit. The photo is my attempt to capture the light, life’s reflections and the promise of RESURGAM, which is a vast interconnectedness that keeps weaving through time.
As for words, remembering Phil Woodall is important. His name is not on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He’s the Vietnam veteran who drew my attention to 47E with two written words: Alpha Company.
From “Learning to Walk in the Dark” by Barbara Brown Taylor:
“How long since we have done this?” Ed asks in my ear.
How long since we have left our house, which we know so well, to climb a hill and sit next to each other in the dark with nothing to do but wait for the moon to rise? How long since we have sat quietly under such enormous space?
“Twenty years,” I say.
“Why is that?” he says.
He and I both know why, but the answer makes me so sad that I cannot say it out loud. We have been busy. For twenty years.
Busy? The word loses all meaning under the canopy of this sky.
My mother’s dementia forced me to enter into deep paradoxes — to lose my mother while she was alive, to encounter the stranger in someone I had known all my life, to face the double bind — and respond the best way I could at the time.
So much truth in the words from the banquet speech of the 2015 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, Svetlana Alexievich.
“Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn’t true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love. And I have hope.
… In one Belarusian village, an old woman bade me farewell with the following words: “Soon we will go our separate ways. Thank you for listening to me and for conveying my pain to other people. I beg you, as you leave, to have a look at my little cabin not only once, but twice. When a person looks a second time, it is not with the eye of a stranger, it is a look with the heart …”
(Excerpts are from Svetlana Alexievich’s banquet speech during the Nobel Prize Banquet on December 10, 2015)
Continue reading “Look with the Heart, Not the Eye of a Stranger”
What is Liminal space? Richard Rohr writes: “Liminal space (from the Latin limen for “threshold”) is an inner state and sometimes an outer situation where we can begin to think and act in genuinely new ways. It is when we are betwixt and between, having left one room or stage of life but not yet entered the next.” Continue reading
I have turned to the “Night Watch” in Seven Sacred Pauses by Macrina Wiederkehr on many days and nights these past ten years. Continue reading “Waiting under the Mantle of Mystery”
creative meander 