Details

This life is so full of lessons about humility and the limits of my power. I feel strongly that I've been put on this planet to heal, to use my tongue, my words, my craft to bring people together. And yet I get hooked all the time, lose patience with those who believe differently than myself, feel that self-rewarding righteousness of indignation when I can see the flaws in the logic of other people that clearly lead to greater harm in the world. And it's all crap. Even when it's true, it's still crap.

The Gulf is still choking.

The Religious Right is still pounding out "pro-family" rhetoric (meaning, f course, pro-a-very-narrow-definition-of-family).

The unmanned drones continue to fly.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been visiting my family in Arizona. I've been fortunate to be able to visit my aging grandparents, my mother, my sister, my nieces. Much of my family stands in a very different political space than myself. I've also been blessed to spend a small amount of time with an old family friend-- the kind for whom the term "friend" has long since dropped off and only "family" remains. He's an uncle, really: loving, kind-hearted, generous. And he's dying from metastatic bladder cancer.

The fact that he's not just a staunch Republican, but one who's always held Ronald Reagan to be one of the great American Presidents, has never really come between us. He and I both have a strong sense of our own opinions, but he's always shown an easy tolerance for my leftist craziness. And now, in the past week when I've been able to catch a few spare moments with him, all of those details seem even less important.

What's important is sharing a smile, a chuckle, or even a comfortable silence. What's important is sharing that simple humanity. The healing that comes from that is deep, nameless.

And it's helped me to remember that it's the details of living that often drive rifts between us. The details are important, don't get me wrong. It's the details that drive our daily decisions and dictate how we live our lives-- how much to consume, how we get our energy, how we build our homes, how we judge other people's appearances. And those decisions are invariable the source of conflict. But in those sublime moments, sitting with an ailing uncle, enjoying the presence of a grandparent, swimming with your nieces, the details fall away, and all the remains is the mystic glow of one spirit reaching out to another.