Uploading pictures regularly to Flickr.

Daniel Lanois — Belladonna

I never, ever feel like going to help her after work. I usually have a bad attitude about it.
— September 13, 2004


Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. — Nelson Mandela





I can be reached at romanlily ~at~gmail.com. Or you can join the notify list here.

September 15, 2005
High tide

So while I'm on the subject of iTunes: I love the way it allows you to sort by titles or albums or genres or even by punctuation marks.

When I type in a question mark into the search box of my iTunes library, I get all kinds of delicious questions:

Is it Wicked Not to Care? (from Belle & Sebastian)
Is That Your Zebra? (from Sam Phillips)
How Long Has This Been Going On? (from Ben Webster)
Who Will Walk in the Darkness With You? (from Black Swans)
Why Should I Love You? (from Kate Bush)
Aren't You Kind of Glad We Did? (from Peggy Lee)


A lot has happened since we last spoke. Man. I need to update this journal more regularly. It's hard to get traction when I only update the site once every six weeks. Let's see: since we last spoke, I signed a lease on a great new apartment. I accepted two little photography jobs (and actually got paid for them). Thousands of people were permanently evicted from their homes by an unstoppable force of nature. The president took another vacation.

The only people I know who live in New Orleans lost everything. This family's home was destroyed. The kids' school was leveled. The university where the husband taught will take several years to rebuild. The family escaped the city with their medical records, a couple of scrapbooks, a laptop computer, and the clothes on their backs.

Can you imagine losing everything like that? A whole lifetime of possessions, gone in the blink of an eye?


I write lots of journal entries in my head, but it's hard to get around to getting them into keystrokes sometimes. There are about fifty entries I am thinking about writing this week, but I'll have to pick just one for now.

This is going to sound peculiar, but the first thing I thought of when I heard about my New Orleans friends losing their home was: wow — wouldn't it be a strange blessing to lose everything you had?

I don't mean to go all Ghandi on you. And of course I'm not trying to celebrate the loss of human life here — I'm just talking about the loss of all the physical stuff. Of course, for many who survived the storm, losing everything they had was not a blessing. It's a bitter and painful thing.

I suppose my response to the losses of this family I know was filtered through the many losses I have gone through over the past year. One thing I have realized in the past twelve months is that when you go through truly devestating shift, whether it's a divorce or a natural disaster, you don't really have a choice about what to take with you as you flee. The storm is terrifying, powerful and indiscriminate. The good news is that your painful, hurtful patterns of responding to that one person are destroyed. The bad news is that your collection of seashells from family vacation when you were ten are also gone.

It all gets washed out to sea.



Maybe I'm saying that it's surprising to see the kind of loss that humans can endure, and the ways we can flourish in the wake of deep loss. I'm thinking of Katrina victims here, and I'm thinking of myself, too.


Last week I went to Athens, Georgia to visit my older brother. I stayed overnight in a beautiful old farmhouse on the property where he lives (all of these pictures were taken in or around that farmhouse). This building is probably a hundred years old. It's a big, dreamy place, with very high ceilings and hopelessly elegant crown moulding and a huge screen door and a front porch with rickety rocking chairs. There is something so timeless about this place. It will probably be there for another hundred years.

In the morning I got up and took a shower and walked around the property for a little while. I think I was actually standing outside taking this picture when fall blew into town:


I lowered the camera, and there was a sense that something had passed. I don't know how it happened, but it felt like a beautiful change had unfolded in that moment. After a long and hard summer full of tears and sweat, and not a small quantity of uncertainty and doubt and worry, it felt like a difficult chapter was closing, and a graceful new one was opening. Right there before my eyes.


What I think is that you can handle more than you thought you could. Loss and pain will never be our first choice. Most of us don't want to volunteer for these trials. But maybe you can actually survive the things that you once thought would kill you.

Maybe you can do better than survive. Maybe you can find an invitation hidden in the deep losses that break like waves. Maybe you can accept the invitation and find what you need to get through the next day, the next week, the next season, when the air suddenly loses its stifling heat, and a brand-new breeze walks up to you and takes you to a place that was never on your map in the first place.