Thursday, June 27, 2013

It's no secret that one of my favorite things about the world is how often it makes something drab so beautiful, how sometimes just for a day or a week a place you might never have noticed flames into something you might never forget. Like my favorite part of a Tony Hoagland poem:
so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.


I am heading back to Florida in a few days for the memorial. I haven't been back since the last memorial. The last few years have seen trips back only centered around sickness and death and while I always dreaded the hot slap of the weather and the overwhelming noise of it all I even more these days dread the memories and the increasing absence of everyone. Knowing how the times when we might all have been happy and all alive, there, are flowing further and further away. 

For distraction I have been feverishly seeking out stories of these flashes of beauty, realizing over and over again that the reason they're so rare is because they can only happen in the perfect conditions, when everything comes together just before it slips away again. It is comforting, how something so rare happens so often, in so many ways. In the same way that the space between all of us has, I guess, even if some of us are now gone.

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