This Change

In the past recent days and weeks I have been surrounded by the prospects and inevitibility of change. Sometimes the change has been to source of choice, other times it has been the result of simply being alive. In almost all cases it has aroused emotions and responses that are less then what one would consider happy or healthy. There have been family members lashing out at each other, friends who have been forced into a sort of exile, questions of mortality and feelings that are best summed up by Franti's lyric "to feel alone like a tree in a desert." Change can be hard, especially when it touches us in a way that we may lose something that is dear to us or when it leaves the sense of having to go through something on our own.

On my way home today a song came onto my ipod from a concert that Beth and I attended back in 02/03 in Eugene Oregon. These are the lyrics:

You don't have to run away
From the bad things you've done to me
You don't have to run away, from the pain and the misery
You can cross this by land you know
Take a boat or you can fly
You can just lay down in the river you know
Lay your head back and just float on by

This change is a good change
This cry is a good cry
This pain I’m feeling is a good pain
This goodbye is a goodbye

So take that bag you carry
Open it up and take a look inside
There might be some angels living there
Maybe even a little bit of suicide
Take all them things you own now
And throw them into the riverside
And say goodbye to the things you know
Say goodbye to the other side

This change is a good change
This cry is a good cry
This pain I’m feeling is a good pain
This goodbye is a goodbye

I say
I walk right into the storm

This change is a good change
This cry is a good cry
This pain I’m feeling is a good pain
This goodbye is a goodbye

Peace

Oh how time slips away

Sitting here tonight with Bruce Hornsby playing in the background, the melody of life slipping by with each note settling within the folds of the tapestry that we all breathe in. It has been some time since this site of reflection was opened. This has been a time of rest and relaxation, of reflection and study. Part of the study has continued to be the past, though this is not a past that is stuck in the death tolls of history, but is ever present in the living moment, constantly shifting under the gaze of the reader. What was life like for the family living along the frontiers between the Ottoman sultanate and the Persia, or on the borderlands of European monarchies? To be a Muslim in Pest, Belgrade, or marching towards the gates of Vienna? To be an Orthodox Christian in the heart of Islam? These are not questions of the state, but of the lives of people. Questions that are still resonating with us today. Questions whose vibrations have been felt beneath the iron gates of Milosevic, raised by the tensions within the Israeli-Palestinian walls. What is Islamic art if separated from Persian and Byzantium influences? These are the study of life not only in the past, but in present America, that sit behind globalization and the shrinking world of instant communication. What did it mean when Ben Franklin stated, "There never was a good war or a bad peace"?