The world is heavy today. It's heavy often. I'm beginning to suspect that it will never get lighter, not truly. It feels heavy to me because I have looked into the face of injustice, because I know how far reaching the curse on this world is, because I feel called to shoulder the burden of my neighbor.
When I was little, after both of parents had remarried and started struggling in their second marriages, I used to mourn the fact that there would never be a complete family portrait. Such a small request, such a normal thing was impossible. To gather people together long enough to take a photo was not possible. It was almost possible at my wedding and at my sister's wedding, but neither of us succeeded. Now that I'm an adult, I feel that grief but on a larger scale. The impossibility of all of the people I care about coming together, holding anything in common for even a moment is, for some reason, a heavy weight for me.
I want the miracle of life to be enough to bring us together. I want to hear us all laugh at the joke that is hidden in the human experience and marvel at the sacred trapped in us all. I want to stay up late with the rest of the planet wondering at how small we all are and how we manage to move our own mountains. Just because we are all here and none of us "chose to be" and all of us are trying so hard to "do life right". Even though I know intimately the thousand complications that divide us, the history that holds our stories, and the selfishness that isolates us, I want so badly for existing to be enough to bring us back together as siblings on a small rock in a big universe.
