In remembrance
It’s so hard to believe that it is one year ago today that Jenny was declared dead by the Broward County Police Department. One year ago as of 1:30 this morning. Being here in Florida, the memory of those first moments of awareness, when Norrie called and told me that there had been an accident, and the days, weeks, and months that followed resonate so clearly.
Yesterday we went to the accident site, laying flowers at the place where the accident occurred, and tried to make sense of the events leading up to the accident with my mother. “That’s the left turn lane she was in,” she said, “and there’s the place where they were staying. That’s where she was going.” But, of course, she never made it.
Thinking about Jen and Gus and, of course, about Kris, who is in California for the weekend with friends, brings back feelings of loss and grief, but also joy and delight. Jenny was so full of life, and loved dearly the warmth and the heat of places like Florida. She loved the ocean, and it’s hard not to think about her and her last days here as we say goodbye.
Norrie and I took Jen’s ashes yesterday, transferred from the bag in which they arrived to a biodegradable urn that will be left at sea once her ashes are scattered. It’s hard to imagine a life so full as Jenny’s being contained in this small bag of what is, essentially, bones. But of course, it’s not Jenny in that urn, but the material manifestation of her life here on earth. Jenny could never be contained, even from the earliest days of her life here on earth, and she never will be. She is everywhere in and around us, everywhere in and around me.
I love you, baby sister, and I miss you each and every day.
Brokenness
There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.
— Rashani, 1991
Half-written
I keep thinking I’m going to be better about posting to my blog, but here I sit with so many half-finished blog entries. I’ve been thinking about what the block is, and I’m realizing that part of it is that I’m a writer. I want to think about what I’ve written before it sees the light of day. Think and reflect. And then edit and rewrite. Repeat.
Maybe someday these half-written entries will see the light of day.
Reading is Not for Everyone
In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it — everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
— Ursula K. Le Guin
“Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading”
Harper’s Magazine, February 2008
Tattoo
In the afterglow I curl up to you,
My face against your back,
My breath warm against my cheek.
I dream of quills, of india ink,
and etching words of love
deep into your soft, white skin.
Musings & Meditations 
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