"i always have a pile" -carrie loucks

so its been one month and four days since i last put keys to screen here...an important trip to haiti, a humiliating end to what i believed was a special relationship, a holiday crisis intervention, an earthquake, a difficult journey back to school, a birthday adventure...all things i have managed NOT to write about...and now i sit dwarfed by this pile of words in my head that would have to be sorted and stacked and sealed together with commas and "dot dot dots" to even begin to try to construct my experiences and thoughts here in a way that might be of use for the greater good. maybe it is because i have talked about them too much to no real avail, maybe it is because i have been sitting with my own stuff too long to be motivated to devote any more creative energy to it, maybe i am just lazy...but when i imagine building that tower of words it feels about as useful as stacking up all the bricks that have fallen in haiti during this month that has gone by...they will be all together but still a mess...and still in the way....and nothing new will have been created...but tonight i had new thoughts that i did get excited about exploring...that pile of words just seemed to be in the way, even before i sat down to write...now that i have made a path around it i am going to leave the pile where it lays...for now...you never know...and the birthday adventure is a pretty good story...the birthday miracles just keep comin...thanks for the new shoes state radio :)

as for these new thoughts...

i was sitting in an african dance class...i just realized how backwards that sounds...to be sitting in an african dance class...but i was...just taking a break to witness (and breathe...i am thirty you know now...hehe...and just a little sickly this week)...anyway...there were three men all drumming in a row on nearly identical djembes and i noticed the most interesting thing...
...the youngest and newest member of the group sat with a straight back and played his drum solidly and almost formally, like they were strangers. it seemed each stroke was a risk or an offering to the drum, to see what the drum might do with it..
...on the other end a white haired man played his drum more comfortably, like and old friend. it seemed he wasn't so much playing the drum as the drum and his hands were having a conversation...
...but the man in the center. he didn't play his drum at all...he moved with the drum, and the drum with him, like it was part of his own body. as he played there was so separation between his movements and the movements of the instrument or the sound it made...he was not putting rhythms onto the drum but seemed to move through the drum, drawing out of it a rhythm as naturally as taking a breath..and letting it draw rhythm from him just as easily...
watching these men and dancing to the music they created showed me something beautiful and powerful...there is so much there i won't begin to try just yet...it was a picture so big i am still taking it in...

as if that were not enough...

on the way home i turned up the radio just in time to hear michael stipe singing "its the end of the world as we know it, and i feel fine"...and i had the weirdest reaction...i immediately saw haitians standing all over the capitol and countryside singing this at the top of their lungs...in english...with R.E.M. backing them up...i told you it was weird. it gets better...as they sang i realized that all the crumbled buildings had melted into fresh clay. i had this childlike urge to dig into that clay and help to shape it into something fun and wonderful before it dried in the shapes of the former buildings...
i would be the last person on earth to want to say anything that even hints at diminishing the pain and loss of what is going on in that nation that i love so much...to those people i love so much...so it is with some caution that i say that in that moment i realized that i have more hopeful and excited thoughts than ones of despair or sadness as i thought of my beloved haiti tonight...right now haiti is experienceing devastation and suffering that can never be measured. it will never be the same...in many ways that is heartbreaking. but in others, i feel way more than fine about the idea that things might never be the same. i would be more than fine with an end to power systems based on fear instead of fairness, an end to poverty rooted in poor choices by foreigners made centuries ago, an end to struggles of fellow humans being ignored simply because those humans have nothing we want, an end to cycles repeating because education it unavailable to the next generation. if we are talking about the end of that world, i do feel fine. doors have been opened and systems have been challenged, and the world has been changed because of those 40 unimaginable seconds. i would love to the many evidences we have seen of strength, love, creativity and resilience have wide berth to grow and flourish and become "the norm." and this is not just about haiti. be it earthquakes or recessions...revivals or revolutions....i think things are happening all over right now that might feel like the end of the world as we know it...what if that is the beginning of a world like we never dreamed...these struggles are revealing a goodness that we didn't know or remember...what if there is room being made for more beauty and more harmony and more love than we would have ever anticipated possible in the world as we know it? just. what. if.