It Took Hours To Turn

Family's The One Thing You Can't Change. You Can Cover Yourself With Tattoos. You Can Get A Grapefruit-sized Ring Going Through Your Earlobe. You Can Change Your Name. You Can Move To A Different Continent. But You Cannot Change Who Your Parents Were, And Who Your Siblings Are, And Who Your Children Are.

He Watched A Catbird Hopping Around In An Azalea That Was Readying Itself To Bloom; He Envied The Bird For Knowing Nothing Of What He Knew; He Would Have Swapped Souls With It In A Heartbeat. And Then To Take Wing, To Know The Air's Buoyancy Even For An Hour: The Trad Was A No-brainer, And The Catbird, With Its Lively Indifference To Him, Its Sureness Of Physical Selfhood, Seemed Well Aware Of How Preferable It Was To Be The Bird.

Love Is About Bottomless Empathy, Born Out Of The Heart’s Revelation That Another Person Is Every Bit As Real As You Are. And This Is Why Love, As I Understand It, Is Always Specific. Trying To Love All Of Humanity May Be A Worthy Endeavor, But, In A Funny Way, It Keeps The Focus On The Self, On The Self’s Own Moral Or Spiritual Well-being. Whereas, To Love A Specific Person, And To Identify With His Or Her Struggles And Joys As If They Were Your Own, You Have To Surrender Some Of Your Self.

If You Look At The New Testament, It's A Gospel Of Love. Yes, There's Talk Of Judgement And There's Talk Of Heaven And There's Talk Of People Not Getting Into Heaven, But It Doesn't Seem To Me That The Fundamental Message Of The Gospels Was One Of Guilt And Retribution So Much As Love.

She Wondered: How Could People Respond To These Images If Images Didn't Secretly Enjoy The Same Status As Real Things? Not That Images Were So Powerful, But That The World Was So Weak. It Could Be Read, Certainly, In Its Weakness, As On Days When The Sun Baked Fallen Apples In Orchards And The Valley Smelled Like Cider, And Cold Nights When Jordan Had Driven Chadds Ford For Dinner And The Tires Of Her Chevrolet Had Crunched On The Gravel Driveway; But The World Was Fungible Only As Images. Nothing Got Inside The Head Without Becoming Pictures.