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Because sometimes it takes a whole month to write it down.

I type with hands that are redolent with garlic, onion, and freshly grated ginger. Today contains a chunk of time for cooking, with hearty stew for him, and Indian spinach rice, spicy, for her.

I walk and sit and rest and work with a heavy heart, weighted near equally with sadness over my cousin Philip’s sudden passing and with the aftermath of a terror attack in NYC. From both those stews, I pull the same saturated question: Is this the new normal, then? Will my peers, other cousins, friends, siblings, begin the dying times now? Is terror on the streets a new given in these not-so-united States?

This is not the self-portrait I want to create. This is the real and Wednesday me, though, as I slosh through to-dos with a heart that is stretched out from carrying big sacks of sad.

And yet, and yet. Perhaps my jiggly, overstretched atriums and ventricles have ever more room for loving, and accepting. Compassion for all beings, or as many as I can find my way towards/ forgiving and embracing and

that Voice, the one that doesn’t belong to me, the one I know I am a part of, soothes low and smooth with notes of

It will be OK. This, too, shall pass.

There is much work to be done here. Tikkun Olam, heal the world you got, baby, and it is good and honest work of heart to hands, heart to words

written
and spoken
and sung.

–Melinda Coppola

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