Nothing Gold Can Last (or how a beautiful moment is a sad soliloquy in the works)

I took a break this afternoon from my slowly and poorly evolving dissertation to glance through some old family photo albums.  The past is amazing and beautiful and so tinged with a faint-but-ever-present sadness.  But it's a beautiful, sweet, poetic kind of sadness; people's frozen fearless smiles hide a myriad of dreams that would never come true, and dated outfits conceal wounds and insecurities that you will never know about the people you thought you knew completely.

Nostalgia is about remembering, but in a way, it is also about knowing.  Knowing better now, in the present.  And knowing that you know nothing, still, like then, when you thought you knew everything.

Awesome haircuts, too.

A Saturday night alone with my dissertation (and three love songs, that really aren't love songs, but are kind of about love in some way)

I've been sitting here all night, trying to find the discipline to finish transcribing the last of  my dissertation interviews, but not able to turn off my music and give my full attention to a recording of someone talking about Mountain Pine Beetle policy failure.  The music has won tonight, like it usually does.

And it has won because I currently feel like Joni Mitchell in "Both Sides Now"

"I've looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It's love's illusions I recall
I really don't know love at all"

..and sometimes like Karen Carpenter in "Goodbye To Love," the most brutal song ever.

"...and all I know of love is how to live without it"

But it's songs like this that keep me going; songs that meditate on the little slices of magic in the world; in the moments that, however brief, however fleeting, make us marvel at how beautiful the world is, and how sometimes, everything can change in a moment. 

"I met a girl on Halloween
When she was lost, and I was drunk
And it was dark and cold out 

When we left

And as we walked the rain started
The leaves softened with every step
And all around us people slept 

Alone with their dreams"

On layovers, long and short...

I've been in Vancouver for a few weeks now, after a weekend in Toronto and a quick stop in San Francisco on my way back over.  I've been plugging away slowly at my dissertation (ahhh!!! two weeks to go!!!) and trying to keep my chin up in the face of a heavy heart and a tired mind.  

The last month has been pretty rough-and-tumble.  But I'm putting the pieces back together.  Or life is, anyway.  It's good to be home.  It's good to be with family I love, and friends I love, in a place that I love.  

I'm going to be just fine, I'm sure.  Until I'm not again.  And the journey continues...

Vancouver

Keats Island

Keats Island

San Francisco

Toronto