“The world is violent and mercurial–it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love–love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”

Interview with Tennessee Williams – Conducted by James Grissom, New Orleans,1982.

The love of a parent is really the only thing you have to offer when your child is hurt and changed by this mercurial world. Whether it will do any good is up for grabs. Right now our helplessness dominates, with the inability to douse the flames of pain and forced adjustment in this burning building, two weeks post accident, 10 days of ICU and four operations later, now in the general section of the Trauma hospital.

But love is what we have, we offer, we preserve through these foggy times. And I will try and post this week short reminders of the fact that trauma can befall us all and that many people have successfully overcome it, adjusting to new realities, honestly an effort to persuade myself. Or I will choose something that simply inspires, to lift the spirit. Photographs will be from my walks, the one constant in my life, depicting the beauty of nature that is harshly indifferent to grief, and yet nourishing in its own way.

I’ll start with a bird that I had never seen before and now encountered several times – a Lazuli Bunting – whose cheerful coloration and sweet song are the opposite of everything that’s going on right now, and therefor to be tucked away in a small corner of my soul.