I have my beginning, my muse, my reason for writng

That Your Days May Be Long is all about what matters above all - relationship.  

Relationship with the Divine, by whatever Name you ascribe, begins & ends in relationship with others, with our self.  And that begins with respect, with honoring, outside of love affection friendship.  Respecting people as they are, not as we want them to be or suspect they might.  Seeing what presents itself in front of us, always knowing it is never the whole, often not even a teensy fraction.  Always knowing we can be thrilled or horrified by actions, but can never judge the intentions behind them.

The relationships I "know" best are within my family, so my book will be a long look at them, relationships that transcend the individuals to take in an unintelligible quality that I might - might - learn of in some future afterlife, for it is beyond our understanding.   .

Being whole within our self, with others, with the Divine starts with the ground on which we stand, with the home in which we were raised, wherever it might be.  

Ever since teaching high school biology & health, I've said that family is our very own petri dish, our first laboratory for understanding the reality around & within us.  But it is so much more than I imagined.  When we can honor & respect our parents as human, full of strength & frailty, with their own unknown stories, we can do the same to our siblings, to others around us, as close as next door or as distant as world capitals.  Even with our self.  

It is beyond my ken that what freed my heart to writing what has beckoned was a crucial family moment that, instead of spelling disaster, cracked open my universe.  It took family, respecting it where it is, as it is, to butt kick me into action.

And so, it begins. With love, respect & honoring.

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