Dear Benny

Benny:

Your writing always brings joy to my life, even when about the very real challenges we face.  

  

I could write you about my struggles, for sure.  Life doesn't feel full of ease at the moment.  

But you asked for what is good.  

And life does have moments of beauty, so many moments, that I gloss over as if they are inconsequential. I am working hard to pull them out from the darker narrative that seems so easy to tell and fret over.  It's in our biology to dwell on perceived threats.  We have to be alert to protect ourselves.  Life, plus big screen media-projected life, gives us endless material.  And it is all true.  

 My work is to highlight and celebrate the moments my mind has made small.  I made that choice, to shrink them, so I'm consciously choosing to make them big.

Like when I watched my coworker Erika, a beautiful Puerto Rican woman, marry the love of her life, a gentle giant of a Moroccan man.  Or when she told me the wedding present I gave her, a painting she had said she really liked in a photograph, made her cry.  Or when Xaq, a newer friend, stopped me on the street yesterday to tell me he liked my blog, and wanted some advice for keeping a practice going. Or when two boys from last year's class 8th grade class, who struggled hard the whole year, came back today to school to give us teachers all hugs.  Ninth grade boys returned to their old middle school.  For hugs.  How amazing to receive such feedback and have proof our spheres of influence are real and powerful for others.   How amazing to have such golden moments.  They are so easy to bury underneath the trauma and tragedy of the world.

And what of the BIG work that people are doing to address the ills they see in the world?  Those who rally against climate change?  The shifting landscape towards small scale farming?  Tiny house communities?  The sudden national momentum towards marriage equality?  It could be easy to dismiss these as simply moves addressing wrongs.  But  is it also not possible to acknowledge that they are the light?

I am probably just as, if not more, pessimistic and distraught about what I perceive as our direction than you, and many in our country.  So I MUST celebrate these moments. They are just as real as the craters in Siberia.  As the Israeli-Palestine conflict.  As my breakup.  And they are so important.  Why diminish them?  Why call them but small flickering lights in the darkness?  

Tell me what you see that you've made small.  Celebrate it.  You and I, we cannot afford be lazy and fall into the all too familiar mournful story.  We MUST see and feel the good, both to save ourselves, and to be honest about all the world is.

With deep admiration,

Erica