When we were in Switzerland having a lovely ski-mountain lunch with our son and his wife right before the pandemic, I overheard one of their friends refer to “Matthew’s elderly parents” who were here for a visit.
I was 76.
Elderly? Me?
Read moreLETTING GO
And I’m not even sure why I’ve chosen to write about such a challenging subject for this post, especially right before Geoff’s birthday. I can feel the beginnings of the anniversary sadness that always hits me around this time, so close to the holidays, the memories that crash and spill into my heart.
Read moreMOTHERS of UVALDE
I am surrounded with beauty, here at the beach. Birds trill, hydrangeas are beginning to bloom as peonies and rhododendrons surrender their brilliant petals, sand and sea are everywhere, and our small cottage allows a simplicity of living that is not possible at home.
It’s pretty wonderful, and I am grateful for the respite.
But it’s impossible to get away from the news. And as I have written here many times, I choose not to, as I believe it’s crucial that I/we bear witness to the travesties and injustices in this unsettled world, even if we can do nothing about them.
Read moreANOTHER WORLD
He could be here. I always think that when I arrive at a residency, looking around for a youngish middle-aged man, maybe round glasses and an earring, battered leather jacket and jeans, Geoff’s standard college outfit. I’m guessing it might have been his adult one as well, at least some of the time. He could be a visual artist or sculptor, I think, perhaps a curator or an art historian—maybe a writer, he was so good at that too.
And sometimes I find him---as I did in this session at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I didn’t put it all together at first—that is often the way of these vivid synchronicities.
Read moreTHE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE
That was a phrase I used in my eulogy for my mother, as a way to describe the space felt by such a loss, and I came across it again in an astoundingly good book I’ve just finished, Lost and Found, by Kathryn Shultz.
It seems like a perfect description of what we are all experiencing right now.
Everywhere we look there is absence. On our calendars, on grocery shelves, in our children’s classrooms, in restaurants and theaters, in the once-familiar texture of our days, in life as it used to be. The relentless disappearance of all we’ve long taken for granted is a fact with which we must reckon daily. We can no longer truly see each other, masked as we are—we struggle with the absence of spontaneity, the lack of joy, the unbalancing of constant uncertainty.
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