What has sustained me all these bleak years?
Getting out of bed a half hour before first light and watching another new day gracefully make its way onto the world. Trying to relocate myself in better illuminated settings from my past. Can I replicate some form of those here and now? Admitting I've still been hitting a few balls out of the park over these many seasons. Despite everything.
Re-membering: bringing back together; again forming a whole from scattered parts. Dreaming. Can the future be an updated version of those parts when they still were whole, before they cracked and scattered?
This is earthquake country. Before I visited the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA last Tuesday, I read about the project. Probably related to moment skyscraper and high rise construction that bends in an earthquake or a storm so it doesn't crack and break, the entire new museum wing can bend and extend five feet.
I may have mentioned a friend's comment that a mutual acquaintance is "very establishment," without adding a negative or a positive interpretation. They simply are. I'm still "very Y2K." That means I've experienced 911, the Great Recession that my economics degree insists qualified as another Great Depression, the Covid pandemic, the January 6 insurrection, and a long series of shipwrecks and disappointments in my own life. Along with the rest of my population cohort, I've survived global and individual assaults, so a return of anything Y2K-ish will present itself differently from the original.
Have I learned to bend in the storms and earthquakes? Yes. More by necessity than by intention. Have I cracked and broken? Or have I bent?
At my church in Previous City, during the offerings of bread, wine, and tithes, as they set the Eucharistic Table we'd sing from Psalm 116:
God invites me and everyone to the feast! "Jesus Christ, the bread of life; Jesus Christ, the cup of salvation!"What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me?
I will offer the sacrifice of thanksgiving and will call on the name of the Lord.
I will take the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.
I will pay my vows to the Lord now in the presence of all his people,
in the courts of the Lord's house, in the midst of you, O Jerusalem.
beautiful
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