This weekend I went to a celebration for N. The day was clear, the breeze was blowing, and the open windows let it all in. He went to a performing arts school and it was really touching to see the sense of community and kinship that exists in pockets of people who have common goals and what positive potential there is in that – restored my faith in humanity a bit. Living in the Silicon Valley can sometimes strip that away from you.
It made me think about death and how it is going to happen to all of us, it’s just a matter of how and when.
It helped me become less resistant to it as N was celebrated in such a meaning and befitting way – not just by people speaking and remembering him, but by doing and continuing his legacy through music. I came to the realization that the concept of us truly lives on in the people we choose to touch.
It made me think of what my own legacy would be.
Perhaps if nothing else, I would hope that I leave a small, silent legacy of integrity. I hope that the people I touch become more honest with others and to themselves in even a small way as it’s so easy to get away from that as we cope with navigating through a world with a lot of clutter and noise in it on top of trying to just navigate through our own monkey brains.
I hope when others think of me, they do so with the same sentiment as one would have reading a deep piece of poetry that truly speaks to them, more as a testament of my lacking ability to do so sometimes.
Perhaps this one:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
Or perhaps a poem of my own someday. Or perhaps just a poem of your choice.