Happy Trails, Happy Circles
June 21, 2025…
We left El Salvador for the last time this morning. It was an unremarkable morning. Thin clouds stretched out and blocked the blue sky, refracting the sunlight so it slumped downward weak and gray. The green grass in the backyard was long and wild and it wore last night's rain like a shining shroud. We sat in the empty house with the ceiling fan on and waited for the airport shuttle to come. Then it came. We rode it away. Remarkably unremarkable. And tonight that house holds still, rain is beating on the roof but no one is inside to cherish the sound. That seems like a great, cosmic wrong.
Moonlight. (Varanasi, India; November 2017)
Now I'm somewhere over Nashville, Tennessee. That's what the airplane captain just said. It's almost the end of the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere. The shortest day of the year where my son lives, in Peru. Thousands of miles apart. I'm tipped toward the sun, he's tucked beneath the shadow of the world's waistline. Things will change though. Over the next six months the shade his body throws to the south will shrink and shrink and shrink, and my shadow pointing north will grow and grow and grow. Until we've traded places. Then we'll tilt back the other way, making wonderful circles with our lives. That may be the most powerful word I know: circle. Everything is born and everything dies, but everything also comes back. Winter melts into spring. Night brightens to day. Fire clears the ground for new life to break through the ash and find the light. Old people fall but young people rise.
Sunlight. (Rabat, Morocco; November 2024)
This world is big and wide and we can be so far from those we love. There is so much space out there. It can feel swollen and oceanic. Too vast to traverse. Some people pillory thoughts and prayers as trite, empty excuses for real action. There's something to that critique. But it's also an unimaginative critique. Thoughts and prayers come from somewhere and go somewhere and do things no campaign or activist or media blitz or fundraiser can do. They fold up space and time like a wormhole so you can push yourself through it, pull people through it, thread ourselves together in a circle, thread love and hope together in a circle, thread then and now together in a circle. We're closer together than we think, nearer to past and future than we think, great living circles simultaneously going and coming, falling and rising. Happy circles.
