photo from http://www.orangebeautiful.blogspot.com/
Last Thanksgiving, I was hanging out in San Diego with families in their wet suits frying turkies on charcoal grills on the beach. I once read a "tip" in Real Simple or some such magazine to send cards out for holidays other than the winter ones. So I sent a bunch of Thanksgiving cards, as the holiday that year with spending Thanksgiving morning at The San Diego Zoo (?) seemed fitting.
I received an email reply from an acquaintance of mine who had become a friend via email. She said "Happy Thankgiving" and in other news, she had just been assaulted by someone she knew. I stood there in disbelief, and then in further disbelief that I was so suprised. Did I think that because my situation has been "settled" in a court of law that no one else in my life would ever be assaulted? I guess I kind of did. I guess I thought that if I kept telling my story, volunteering, giving myself to others that those others were protected. Not so.
I wish I could tell you all the details of how lovely and talented this person is, and how quickly I loved her heart. It colors everything she makes. Just recently she filled me in on what she had to do to get her life back and have some semblance of normalcy. I am so proud of the decisions that she made, and as difficult and as challenging as they must have been, she's pushing through the black.
Some days I get emails from strangers and they shake me to the core. And then there's a Thanksgiving when I open email from a friend and I feel like there is the world that we talk about about and pretent to live in, and then the world where our bodies are taken from us and there's no sign of it stopping any time soon.
With no support from our society, we are rebuilding our homes over and over again and under every layer of paint is another yellow wallpaper . If you know/remember how that story goes, in 1892 the story was rejected by several editors, one of whom supposedly claimed that "the story made him feel "miserable", and therefore did not want society to be subjected to similar feelings." That could have been written today.
I received an email reply from an acquaintance of mine who had become a friend via email. She said "Happy Thankgiving" and in other news, she had just been assaulted by someone she knew. I stood there in disbelief, and then in further disbelief that I was so suprised. Did I think that because my situation has been "settled" in a court of law that no one else in my life would ever be assaulted? I guess I kind of did. I guess I thought that if I kept telling my story, volunteering, giving myself to others that those others were protected. Not so.
I wish I could tell you all the details of how lovely and talented this person is, and how quickly I loved her heart. It colors everything she makes. Just recently she filled me in on what she had to do to get her life back and have some semblance of normalcy. I am so proud of the decisions that she made, and as difficult and as challenging as they must have been, she's pushing through the black.
Some days I get emails from strangers and they shake me to the core. And then there's a Thanksgiving when I open email from a friend and I feel like there is the world that we talk about about and pretent to live in, and then the world where our bodies are taken from us and there's no sign of it stopping any time soon.
With no support from our society, we are rebuilding our homes over and over again and under every layer of paint is another yellow wallpaper . If you know/remember how that story goes, in 1892 the story was rejected by several editors, one of whom supposedly claimed that "the story made him feel "miserable", and therefore did not want society to be subjected to similar feelings." That could have been written today.
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