Family Matters

As mentioned in a recent post, my daughter Kerala wrote a stunning piece on Substack about microdosing on national news and turning our energy toward local events building community and uplifting local culture. As she did organizing a recent block party for the neighbors. It was a piece that I could have written, but she did it better. She also treated herself to a solitary hike in a beautiful wilderness area to celebrate her birthday. 

 

Yesterday, my wife Karen led another in a series of trash pick-up that brought some 30 folks in the neighborhood. Changing the world one properly-disposed cigarette butt at a time. This weekend she will write postcards as she has the last 9 years to try to awaken voters to make more informed choices. A few days earlier, she went on a long hike in Marin County with a guided group.

 

My daughter Talia came to the clean-up and led some simple, fun and immediately-bonding opening activities. The kind of things I always do in my workshops that she did as well, if not better. We walked side-by-side with our fun grabbers competing for the next piece of garbage we found. The day before, she walked 7 miles starting at 5:00 am with her entire 5^th grade class to school, a monthly ritual inspired by the once-a-year walk our family took on Earth Day back when she was a kid at the school. When we returned to my house to drop off the poles, she went to the piano and played a Schumann piano piece from her childhood piano lessons that she still remembers. Next weekend, she will be camping in Yosemite.

 

My sister Ginny wrote me a thank-you card for treating her to a birthday lunch at the restaurant where we used to take my parents. She talked about her deep pleasure in being in the Autumn of her life and feeling more happy and more whole than ever before—the identical things I had just written about a few Blogposts back (that she never read). 

 

Her son Ian is in Portland doing good work with urban planning, her son Kyle is writing poetry in Austin, Texas (we have memorized some of the same classic poems), her son Damion is local in Sebastopol and doing some fine work as a drama therapist. Their Dad Jim has also written poems and other pieces his whole life and kept up with some high-quality amateur musicianship, from fiddle to tinwhistle to djigeridoo.

 

I believe all of us will be out marching in our local places at the October 18^th No Kings Rally. Also my nephew Eren and niece Zoe on my wife’s side of the family, one working in sustainable fishing and the other in the healing profession—a doctor.

 

In short, all the things that can go wrong in families, all the divisions and disappointments and failed relationships, seem to have gone right in ours. We are all moving forward interconnected in the things we do, the things we think about, the things we care about. Exercise, good cooking, time spent in the natural world, lovingly caring for children (both our own and others), eloquent writing, commitment to social justice. Ironically, not so much the music and art that have been such a big part of my life and my wife’s, but so it is. 

 

Of course, we all have our own disappointments and relationship conflicts, but they are all in a small, human-size proportion and framed inside all these greater connections. No intention to proudly proclaim us as some model family, but simply to say out loud what I so deeply appreciate. With all the energy I spend on professional “success,” I turn the camera towards these family matters and publicly declare, “Family matters.”