(not) a.lesser.sojourn
Somehow, from the beginning, I understood in India, as never before, that virtue lies in rushing toward each day with its joys and adventures, and even its pain, and that the only real sin is demeaning God’s gift of each day by turning away.
A.M. Rosenthal
In less than a month, I will return to Rosenthal’s India, with its motion and color and kindly friends, its scent of dung and marigold, its heat, muck, anger, laughter, elegance, decay. I want to find what he found: that running forward into each day, afraid or unafraid, seizing the gift as it is given!
But tomorrow, first, I will return to my father’s Birmingham. To a tiny room in a rehab center where his mind is cramped between blank walls. I’m returning so as not to miss the adventure of his going back home, the careful rearrangement of books and bottles within his more limited reach, the fine tuning of a new electric wheelchair, the installation of an elevated desk, the tender placement of his broken, bound, and booted ankle, the dicey scoot across a board with which he has learned to slide from mattress to chair.
It seems a long way from the red and fuchsia swathing my anticipation of India, this trip back home. But it is not. I pause today and remember in my bones: my home and my horizon; my family and my foreign dreams, all, all are calling me to rush into their arms. Calling me into the muck, anger, laughter, decay that is everyday. Even into the pain.
All I have to do . . . is not to turn away. Which is everything.
Susan
Susan
Stephanie
A Still Life...A Life Still 
“Calling me into the muck, anger, laughter, decay that is everyday.” Beautiful words.