“My work will be finished if I succeed in carrying conviction to the human family, that every man or woman, however weak in body, is the guardian of his or her own self respect and liberty. This defense avails, though the whole world may be against that individual resister.” – Mahatma Gandhi
The way this girl looks at me makes me think, on lots of things…
I stumbled, quite literally, upon this quote at Balboa park in San Diego. It was hiding in a thicket of succulents and other collaged bits and pieces. I took a picture of this wall and when I went to edit my images from the morning, there it was, and I read it for the first time.
“This isn’t my job,” I say to myself – at least not in the sense that Gandhi was talking about it. But I know that it is my job to do this for myself.
To do this for my kids…to teach them to be individuals, to be individual resisters.
Alice asks so many questions lately. Lots of “why” questions and “who made the first person” questions, and “fairness” questions, and questions about the physics of cement trucks, or the origin of language, and the “why can’t I have a puppy” question, and I don’t have perfect answers for her. So I do my best, and I hope that she can take some small piece of what I’m saying and wrap her brilliant little head around it.
I realize she asks these questions because her world is expanding and her expression of that is broadening; which is wonderful and terrifying at the same time. How do I tell her everything, and prepare her for everything?
I’m not sure. I’m mulling it over…
My vision of this life, this planet, it’s like a glassine web extending outwards, but wrapping around in layers, folding over on itself. Sleek and architecturally sound. One small footstep all the way on the other side, however faint, still sends echoes and ripples across to the other hemisphere.
I can see it all around me, thru the lens of Alice. Her wonderment at the way her own body moves when she hears music, her tenderness with her big, tough twin brothers, her enthusiasm for sparkly nail polish, the giddiness she has when teasing me over my somewhat constant motherly orders, her fits of giggles as I brush her teeth and purposely also brush her little nose. I’m starting to think maybe I don’t need to prepare her as much as I supposed.
It seems she is really teaching me most of the time.
These last couple of weeks, it feels like we might be standing on a little slice of the world where the earth is nearly all calm and all quiet. It’s so unusual, but this is what it’s like when you have been moving so fast for so many days in a row and then suddenly, you rest, you stop, you look around.
But it’s just a moment hanging in time and tomorrow the world will be different.
So please, be your own individual resister and GO VOTE!
xo
k
beautiful.