Looking out From the Couch

Wow, February 24th was the last time I wrote. Nearly a month ago, perhaps my longest pause. And now, how does one begin?

In light of whatever notable events have transpired inside these walls -- Silas eating mango that "tastes like joy," Eden naming a butterfly in a jar Panda Puffs, Silas naming his early birthday blue beta fish Rainbow Boy -- outside these walls the world is changing. Changing as I sit on my couch, changing as I plan Silas's birthday party with Ben, as I watch my favorite youtube video, as I walk around the bay, as I battled with tantrums, as I make tea in my kitchen. The face of the middle east is changing, the landscape of Japan, so many thousands of lives -- changed, destroyed.

I just read a letter from a friend of a friend living in Japan who said as of Wednesday night there were still earthquakes every 15 minutes and a constant rumbling in the earth. I wonder why I haven't read this in any papers. Her account was so much quieter than the shaky videos of the relentless wave plowing through neighborhoods and overturning cars, it was even tinged with gratitude for how kind people have been to one another, and of course also saturated with the devastation...

And this is life, right? Holding these tensions in our small hands: the intimate and the public, the immediate and the global, the finite and the infinite, the physical and the spiritual. It's easy to consume, and be consumed by, one or the other. But to hold both at once, to allow for them to settled equally deeply into our gut, maybe that's why we're here.