I’m positive I am not the only human on the planet to experience unnecessary yet understandable worries. We worry most about losing the things we love the most.
The pandemic has been a rotten thief. We’ve lost freedom, sleep, and large blocks of time. Some folks lost their jobs, missed opportunities and more than a few lost their way. Millions lost loved ones.
For most of the early pandemic, my family chose to visit by phone versus visits in-person. My Dad lost nine months of his retirement years and I feel cheated I missed seeing him on those lost weekends.
We could worry about the drought, but that’s low on the list of other concerns. Drought seems like yesterday’s news, or more precisely the years of 2012-2016.
I might not worry at all about water, except I love gardening. It’s fun to look forward to buying new plants, but not if you’re shopping to cover up bald spots in the yard. Plus, water is important for putting out fires.
I won’t be here in 100 years, but I had always bargained the trees would be. When I visited my most-loved park last year, Yosemite, it was almost as beautiful as I had remembered. The Sierra Nevada hills were patched in brown and bark beetles were doing a happy dance. Mother Nature had turned off the spigot to a waterfall and the sky was filled with smoke.
All these things could keep me up at night, but lately it’s been tough to sleep under a heat dome.
Of course, most of these worries are because I’m afraid of losing things that I love, which means that so far I have been blessed.
Words to hold onto
I enjoy collecting words that have a larger meaning than the sum of their syllables. Sometimes writers embed words in a new context.
Author Milan Kundera once described the word “weltschmerz” as “homesickness for a place you have never been.” If that’s not the dictionary definition, it should be.
Mercurial.
Ferocious.
Feral.
Catharsis.
Unleashed.
Yearn.
I could only attempt to describe what I think about the word “agape.”
One sweltering day LaDona invited a stellar group of women to her house to enjoy air conditioning and an oversized TV. She served beverages in frosted glasses and we watched captivating people dance and sing.
The flick was “In the Heights,” which wasn’t as good as “Hamilton” but leaps above the Hollywood version of “Cats.”
In one musical segue, the character Abuela Claudia gets her last song.
“Alabanza,” the dramatically-beautiful ensemble sings.
A simple synonym for the word could be “praise.” Yet it takes 7 lines of lyrics to give the word texture.
“Alabanza,” actors define through harmony, is to praise small pleasures with gratitude.
The refreshment of a vandalized fire hydrant,/ short but meaningful conversations at the convenience store,/ the soft breeze from a rooftop patio,/ condensation on a Coke bottle/ the celebration of a life lived well.
Alabanza, the songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda explains, “means to raise (these things) to God’s face and to sing.”
And they sing, and they sing and they sing, doing a dance here and there, to remind the viewer that “alabanza” can be sung to praise what has been loved and lost, or to praise all that remains.
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July 30, 2021 at 05:39PM
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