MOTM Jerry Garcia

I am always at least surrounded by individuals who are strong, smart, reasonable and who care for me and aren't afraid to share their thoughts and it has been this aspect of my life that has my attention more than ever now that the focus for me is nurturing important relationships and feeling, at once, blessed to have them in my life and it is days like today and weeks like this one when I can see with such clarity that which makes me take a breath, deeply, like the breath that a relationship often takes like the slack between tides, at the apex of change or the final [gaseous] heave of the corpse, a pause between two places or people, the median, the juxtaposition, Taijitu, where balance is imminent and necessary and the forever equation that the cosmos is forever doing and forever undoing and rarely, stubbornly showing her work in a way that I'm prepared for--like 15 years ago today, Aug. 9, 1995, no one can question whether or not I can recall that day and it's apex for me, the great pause in my life, the day, really, when everything changed (a bit naive since I hadn't birthed a child but similarly and in retrospect, this day was the biggest breath I've taken) and it started with a phone call to an apartment in Portland, Oregon where myself and my boyfriend slept onlly on a floor and drinking wine only from a gallon jug, the death of Jerry Garcia was announced to us through tears on a phone line suspending into mid air above me went my entire impetus for being on the west coast in search of the kindest of everything and in a breath had suddenly reached it highest and lowest point in a simultaneous explosion of confusion and hurt and such a feeling of emptiness that I actually can't say that I've recovered from it but here is that moment revisited and the man with his genius and magic swirls in and out of my EVERY SINGLE DAY and through the lives of my children and my father who heard his first Peggy O twenty years ago and grooved in a way that made me look at him as not the same man I've known but one who listens with the same heart that I have and as I continue to struggle with the loss of this talent Jerry Garcia has continued to accompany me on many deeply intense experiences and conversations and paintings and thoughts and writings and miles driven and miles run and even during both births of my boys, these are things that cannot be taken away, so today I take that pause, like I do every year at this time, to recognize a guy that has given so much to my life and I thank him, wholeheartedly, and I miss him, selfishly. So many roads to ease my soul.