June 8, 2025

The world is full of places

On Friday, a funeral. Today, a family reunion / 90th birthday gathering some four generations deep.

In all circumstances, gratitude. For the friends who roll deep. For the decades of shared jokes and references with far-flung relatives. For the myriad introductions to people who knew you before you knew yourself. For the experience of becoming that aunty from foreign, for being able to step into the roles that others played for you.

Attribution

The approach of a man’s life out of the past is history, and the approach of time out of the future is mystery. Their meeting is the present, and it is consciousness, the only time life is alive. The endless wonder of this meeting is what causes the mind, in its inward liberty of a frozen morning, to turn back and question and remember. The world is full of places. Why is it that I am here?

— by Wendell Berry, from The Long-Legged House