A Brief History Of The World

In the beginning, sadness choked out the living.  


Later, there was life in the midst of sadness.  


Now there's sadness in the midst of life.


I didn't write that.  I wish I had, because it's beautiful, and my true history, my past and my present.  It is painful poetry.


Last weekend, at a bridal shower for my sweet cousin-to-be, I sat at a table surrounded cousins, aunts and my grandmother's sister.  We celebrated the love that brought us all together, the new family being formed, the extension of our family.  We celebrated one another, and ourselves.  I was struck with awareness of the pain, the deaths, the illness, the loss that those women had experienced, that many are going through at this very moment.  And yet we reveled in the joy of one another, in the joy -- in the painful poetry -- of our lives.