This line from your teaching struck me..."What account of our journeys will eventually matter; who will be remembered, and how? Is it about the numbers, bottom line, such as how many miles traveled, dollars spent, soldiers sacrified and presidents serving that we will tell history?" I have been thinking about numbers of photos lately, as I go through boxes (upon boxes and boxes) of old family photos that have come into my possession. How many photos are necessary as a way to remember? It feels overwhelming when a box full of photos is a physical representation of a loved ones "detailed lists and dusty desert roads"...the travels, the love, the family, the moments, the homes. It's chaos in a way, and as you mention here, I am trying to bring some sense of order to preserve the memory. Not sure yet what the path forward is, though I think it's somewhere within me.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts and powerful images. Chaos, daily, dances with order, as decline and demise play hand in hand with delight of each new flower and memory.. maybe the journey to the promised land is just a perpetual inner/outer dance?
Apryl and Peter- your writing was meaningful and provocative. I am in Bethlehem PA now on this hottest day ever recorded in some parts of the globe. The empty, rusted steel stacks tower above me. The factories are eerily empty. So many lives were spent here producing steel for wars, skyscrapers, bridges. Repetitive, ordered hot work. Were their lives elusive, were they counted. Were their names written on the water?
Our hope for a just senate relies on one life of one man who grew up in a similar Pennsylvania steel town.
at some point we'll get to the great poem of Bialik on those giants whose bodies fell in the wilderness - the nameless. There's also Serach, who left Egypt but never died. The mythic imagination invites us to keep walking with them and pick up stands of stories, make up names.. thank you for helping us to do that..
This line from your teaching struck me..."What account of our journeys will eventually matter; who will be remembered, and how? Is it about the numbers, bottom line, such as how many miles traveled, dollars spent, soldiers sacrified and presidents serving that we will tell history?" I have been thinking about numbers of photos lately, as I go through boxes (upon boxes and boxes) of old family photos that have come into my possession. How many photos are necessary as a way to remember? It feels overwhelming when a box full of photos is a physical representation of a loved ones "detailed lists and dusty desert roads"...the travels, the love, the family, the moments, the homes. It's chaos in a way, and as you mention here, I am trying to bring some sense of order to preserve the memory. Not sure yet what the path forward is, though I think it's somewhere within me.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts and powerful images. Chaos, daily, dances with order, as decline and demise play hand in hand with delight of each new flower and memory.. maybe the journey to the promised land is just a perpetual inner/outer dance?
Apryl and Peter- your writing was meaningful and provocative. I am in Bethlehem PA now on this hottest day ever recorded in some parts of the globe. The empty, rusted steel stacks tower above me. The factories are eerily empty. So many lives were spent here producing steel for wars, skyscrapers, bridges. Repetitive, ordered hot work. Were their lives elusive, were they counted. Were their names written on the water?
Our hope for a just senate relies on one life of one man who grew up in a similar Pennsylvania steel town.
at some point we'll get to the great poem of Bialik on those giants whose bodies fell in the wilderness - the nameless. There's also Serach, who left Egypt but never died. The mythic imagination invites us to keep walking with them and pick up stands of stories, make up names.. thank you for helping us to do that..