No matter what goals regularly demand your creative energy and conscious attention, there are days when personal goals take their place within a wider landscape. You have no control over that earlier landscape that is known as family. In fact, much of your life has been taken up making peace with that older context, its wisdom, its values, its offer of love.
Festal days like Thanksgiving give an opportunity for that wisdom and those values and that offer of love to take new shape.
Sometimes on a seashore facing the Atlantic Ocean.
I joined two of my brothers at a niece's house on Cape Cod yesterday. Mid-afternoon we began the customary discussion of a walk before the Thanksgiving meal. The walks have taken place in years past on a nearby college campus or through an old New England neighborhood, uncle in conversation with niece or nephew, brother in conversation with sister-in-law, the late November sky clear, cold and blue or sometimes - like yesterday - grey and cloudy.
As we headed to Cape Cod National Seashore, I watched my oldest brother. He has become a grandfather this year, and I am adjusting my image of him to accommodate the fresh outpouring of love with which he invests each interaction with his grandson. Seeing the two of them on the beach, I felt fortunate to be witnessing the family in the midst of a new burgeoning.
2 comments:
Love a good walk on the shore.
Someday I hope to have my ashes scattered right about there.
It's a dramatic place, isn't it?
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