Last night, we sat on the porch with friends, it’s the last night of our guest’s visit, and the full moon rose over the bayou as if to punctuate the end of five days filled with friends, laughter, food, spirits, and porch hanging. Our neighbors played badminton on the grass and we spoke about religion, the original portage into New Orleans, privilege versus sacrifice, amongst other topics.
This morning while walking through City Park, it occurred to me as I stumbled over a piece of paper tossed on the sidewalk that had JOY written twice on it, that everything I need is right here. My creative life is underway, my house is my home, my job is paying the bills and my family is healthy and friends are nearby. I want for ??? nothing.
I was pasting something in my scrap book this morning and I came across a passage from Silas Marner that I had deemed worthy of writing down many many years ago – George Eliot at her finest:
EVEN people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas — where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, which perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.
Small cycle – the full moon rose last night over the bayou like an old friend; in a blink we were having breakfast on the screen porch saying our goodbyes, one trip ended and mine was about to begin – nothing like a trip coming up to look forward to, and summer’s only beginning.
I woke this morning and thought how wonderful it is that we and a dear friend of ours have adopted two beautiful boys who have brought such joy and light into our life. Eliot begins her tale of Silas Marner with a quote from Wordsworth:
A child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts.
— WORDSWORTH.
At breakfast, our visiting friend told Tin it was going to be hard to leave him to go back to New York – and I said, “Well, you never met his evil twin Skippy who was here just a few weeks ago.”