As Mark says, it's a time of family feeling--explosive, implosive, but also
caring and consolatory. Someone posted this Mary Oliver poem to another
list, and it seems to me to capture the familial ground of this fraught
communitarian filiation so well--Candice
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
--Mary Oliver
> Dear All
>
> I want to thank so many of you for your concern. I have been a witness to
> the horrors only through TV and through the words and phones (when the phone
> was functioning during these horrific times) of friends. No one of us has
> not been affected but it is good to know that we are still human and care
> though terrorism of all sorts will be ours in the States as well as
> everywhere else from now on. Surely we all expected some kind of terrorism
> to descend upon us. Would that our Intelligence officers had sensed it and
> done something about it too. Everything is closed down here. It's a bit
> ironic that a press preview of the Oscar Wilde exhibition at the Morgan
> Library has been postponed today. Can't you imagine Oscar Wilde's smirk at
> its inevitability?
>
> Again, thank you for your concern.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Harriet
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