sister-roommate

Two is better than one:

especially when you have to clean the kitchen

or make food. one cooks, the other washes.

or for keeping each other up way too late at night.

one drags the sleepyhead other up for running in the morning.

for decorating, hanging up pictures and pushing heavy couches.

for coffee company at the morning breakfast table.

for sharing clothes, and

so our silly moments never go unnoticed...

and because life's just sweeter that way!

on living

In yesterday's blistering afternoon heat, Sonja and I walked around the ramparts of the Old City of Jerusalem.  We passed above the Armenian, Muslim, Jewish and Christian Quarters, descending to visit a shop where she had met an Orthodox Jew whom she'd promised to see again to continue a conversation about Abraham's nomadism.  "You see, in the West people have the mentality that life is about getting to a destination.  From A to Z, or A to B.  But here we see it as a journey. Abraham became Abraham on every step of the way.  God didn't tell him where he was going.  It is about the journey," he told us, among other things.  

A journey when you don't know your destination requires a lot of faith.  Faith to move forward. Faith to live with the hope that each moment has a reason and is an integral part of who you become, especially when it seems that you are encamped in one place, not moving forward at all. But such a location would not become so frustrating if our concept of life were less about the destination and more about the journey.  

Rainer Maria Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet, "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue.  Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is, to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer."

And the point is, to live everything.  Live the journey.