I’m working on a book with Dad and it’s a beautiful process.  It’s about maintaining connections through art and with art.

But as Dad goes through his past, and I take dictation and notes…

… I am filled with nostalgia for a life passed, I am filled with the heaviness of missing my mom.

I can sense I am anticipating losing Dad…

even my old dog, Tobey.

Anticipating.  Anxious.  Process.

I know that life is always fluctuating and sometimes we are stronger than other times.  Sometimes we feel power-ful and other times power-less.  Sometimes we hold on so tight, we strangle the moment.  I’m learning that all of it is OK.  There’s no right or wrong.  Only splendid imperfection.

The anxiety that wells up, though, requires some tools so it doesn’t take hold and cause a depression.

And by now, through lots of practice, I have a pretty good toolkit that I carry around with me.

So I embrace the memories.  Ride through heart ache.  Sit with the moment.  Grateful for being able to love and be loved and thus not be immune to loss, nostalgia and sentimentality.

“Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love – from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae(whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.”

― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory