Sometimes you just need to go to the lake. For family time, and reading time, and swimming time (which equates to keep both kids from drowning time). To reconnect with each other and with our own hearts, and perhaps to swing and shoot fallen nuts from a slingshot.
A few of my favorite reads over the last couple of weeks (running the gamut from race to tuna casseroles).
"I think deep down many of us are just a little bit afraid that someone else is doing a better job at this whole thing than we are."The War I Didn't See Coming
"I’ll tell you of the way he glows after a six hour practice, the finesse with which he glides across the floor, the way his very soul leaps from his eyes when he manages a toe touch or perfects a difficult series of steps. I’ll show you a boy who carries himself with grace in manner and spirit, who is strong in character and skill, who is learning of compassion and team effort and how to appreciate the brilliance of life’s beauty." What I wont tell you about my ballet dancing son
"Fewer than one in three black Americans and not even half of whites say the United States has made “a lot” of progress toward achieving racial equality in the half-century since the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared he had “a dream” that one day freedom, justice and brotherhood would prevail and that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” -Racial equality is still a work in progress
"I stand over my oven and I realize that I must, at some point, acknowledge the emptiness. I must feel it. I serve slopping spoonfuls of tuna casserole, I wash the dishes and I feel my emptiness." - Loneliness and Tuna Casseroles
Also, I just finished reading Jesus and the Disinherited, And the Mountains Echoed
(loved it), Dad Is Fat
(hilarious), and am currently reading War of the Bloods in My Veins: A Street Soldier's March Toward Redemption
(more on this later).