Traveling

I'm back in NH this weekend, for the briefest of moments. I arrived on Friday evening and go back to MD on Sunday morning. Purpose of my trip? My friend Stacy's memorial gathering. It was good that I came, but it was a weird gathering, to me. So different from the Greek approach, with TONS of people, food, conversation about the person who is missing. This was very sterile in some ways.

I was sad, cried, and it made me think about how so much of life is such a crapshoot. You live your life, hoping that you're doing the right thing, hopefully doing something that makes you happy. With any luck, you find someone to share it with you who is good to you and to whom you are good. And hopefully you get to spend a lot of years with that person.

It's not fair that Stacy only got three years with her husband, 30 years on earth to do her thing. I know that some people get far less and others waste the time they have, but still, it's just not fair.
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Back to Mary Oliver I go, for some insight:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?