Ohhh, Pasadena...

You are beautiful. Calming. Enchanting. Could rival Portland in green-ness. Fuller: heritage houses you can take classes in! Or work! How cool is that??

The world is to open.

Who knows whether there is life on any other planet anywhere else in the universe, but there is life on this planet. And what is life like? Think of not knowing what life is and then finding out: a book suddenly learning how to read; a rock jutting out into the sea suddently knowing the thump and splatter of the waves, the taste of salt. You are alive. It needn't have been so. It wasn't so once, and it will not be so forever. But it is so now. And what is it like: to be alive in this maybe one place of all places anywhere where life is? Live a day of it and see. Take any day and be alive in it. Nobody claims that it will be entirely painless, but no matter. It is your birthday, and there are many presents to open. The world is to open.
~Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

The reality of context

The reality of context:

Of course, it shapes us—
The streets that we walk-
Or drive
The spaces in which we pass from 8-5
The faces that grace our face
Daily
And sporadically.

Here was the gift she felt so close
She could not see
When, covered in threads of loneliness
She felt the hoarseness of her throat
Conjure up visions of
Surreptitious casualties,
The consequence of long-forsaken treaties.

What is she hoping for
She is not sure
When the curtains have fallen
And the wizard is no more.

That iconic grace kept her plastered to her side.
Hoping that momentous struggle
Meant something—anything—
To keep her striving against the tide.

If it were just a face to behold,
She could look up any number of strikingly arresting visages.
But no—what she longed for
Was to be beholden
Beheld
To be held
Be seen.
And that taste, that sip, was what moved her
To seek
To hope, that,
Seeking, she might find.

Of course,
She thirsts
For what matters.