Magical Mundane

1/23/23

Tom Cruise in his perpetual leather jacket, skids a motorcycle across the tiny window on the seat back next to me. Scratchy stewardess voice drips from overhead. A strip of puffy peach and pink nestles above a froth of blue-white clouds. My snootch face daughter is down there on a three-night sleepover, held up by the love and grounding of those who stayed so we could fly.

Streets lined with 8-foot walls of snow, starlight over ice, big-eyed folks with wet socks and clapping hearts, juggling our way through packed theaters and double-packed house parties, warming our souls in the gaze of people we never knew we’d know and now don’t want to live without. One day feels like five. We fall into bed exhausted and sleepless, our eyes too lit up with the glowing sequin stories we saw, and the fireside dreams of the ones we will tell one day.

All of us in this race against the ticking bomb of life, our messy humanity and fragile brains taking big swings at us as we kick down steel doors of NOs, dance through minefields of all the ISMS, slog across the always burning blaze of racism (inside and out), dodge covid bombs and financial bullets, wade through poison swamps of doubt (from ourselves and others), only to explode out into a sky of endless mystery.

We’re all on our own Mission Impossible, people. Every damn day.

So I will go back to my broken vacuum, scrub out Ozie’s lunch box, which smells of orange peels and strawberry jelly and stack up the endless spins of laundry, so very, very thankful for this Sun Dance but even more thankful for all the battles we fought in order to find magic in the safe snuggle of the mundane.