Ideal and Beloved Voices

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

I am attending our annual family Thanksgiving ReUnion in Fla. I have 5 siblings, and this is the only time in the year when we all get together.
It feels particularly graced this year, because as near as I can calculate, everyone is attending this year -- my nieces and nephews and their kids, all the brothers and sisters.
Thanksgiving night, out on the dock in the river, the wind whipped up the palm trees and the water churned, but it was still warm-ish and velvety with starlight and the lights across the water reflecting.
It seemed like our mother and our father were near, although they have both been dead for years. This was really their place. This river, and these kinds of nights. I guess we love it because they loved it. All the loss and shattered dreams they suffered and we all suffered together as a family have passed into history and events are presenting themselves to the current crop of descendents. It's different to reflect as a group on all the events that we shared - different than thinking or writing or talking about them as a solitary voice rather than a chorus.

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Voices

Ideal and beloved voices
of those who are dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.

And with their sound for a moment return
other sounds from the first poetry of our life --
like distant music that dies off in the night.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)

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“Every creative event that ever happened in the world was an interruption. Unexpected. Unplanned for. The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost. That’s why the planets are so much better company than the stars — they keep wandering back and forth across the sky and you never know where you’re going to find them.”

—	The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail