FULL-SPECTRUM COLOR

This coming Tuesday, November 28, is Giving Tuesday. It’s an opportunity to eschew some of the commercialism of our American holiday season, and spend your money, time, and resources “giving” to the social change organizations that are working tirelessly to make our world good through their mission and initiatives. I invite any of you who are reading this to consider giving to and getting to know an organization that I am proud to be on the board of, one who makes the kind of experiences I described above a reality — the Foundation for Sustainable Development.

I have been reading this morning with heartache of the fires burning all throughout Napa and Sonoma and Mendocino counties just an hour or so north of my Oakland home. I’m grasping at every article in my news feed. In one story, a set of “before and after” photos are juxtaposed showing the devastation brought on by the fires, a complete community in Santa Rosa wiped out. A woman comments below the story that in the photos she is witnessing at that moment the complete decimation of her childhood home, every memory she holds dear of that time and place in her life completely burned to the ground.

As daylight grows shorter by the day, I am wholly aware of the drifting seasons. It’s difficult to summarize my mood from moment to moment, to draw any conclusions. Like the restlessness of the wind, the weather, the news, I feel adrift these days. But moment to moment is what I am given. And so I sit, I breathe, I close my eyes, I dream in memories of still times and set my hopes for the day. And then I move. Onward. It’s the only direction to go.

Today, August 16, 2017, is the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. I remember this day one year ago, each hour of it, with painful clarity. I was nearly 3,000 miles away in my home in Oakland, California as my father was passing from life to death in a hospital room in Annapolis, Maryland, too far a distance for me to arrive in time for his final hour to say goodbye. But we had said our goodbyes just weeks before and many times before that. And so I awaited word from my siblings until that final hour came. When he breathed his last, I felt the pain of his long illness lift away, just the way the summer fog lifted that morning, the sun stretching its arms through grey puffs of clouds. Away he drifted, taking with him a lifetime of love and labor, memories and moments that would never become again.