Remembering …

Monday, May 31, 2021. Today is Memorial Day. Whether we formally, ritually remember – it matters not – somewhere in our memories is a loved one who, no longer with us in this physical place, remains. If we did not directly know them, we know someone who's life was touched by another's unconditional gift to our own. For my own part, my memory is that of my uncle, Eugene Wilson Young, who survived his service in WWII as a gunner in a very vulnerable B24, returning to his Oklahoma home to father five of the most fab cousins imaginable. To you, reader, and those we remember, I offer the following from Kahlil Gibran, appearing in my mailbox on 23 May of 2020:

"It is said that before entering the sea, a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than to disappear forever. But there is no other way. The river can not go back. Nobody can go back. To go back is impossible in existence. The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean, because only then will fear disappear, because that's where the river will know -- it's not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean." – Kahlil Gibran, quoted on servicespace.org (5.23.20).