A little shaky, this is the view from the 25th floor apartment of my friends L and H, who pride themselves on making their guests work for their dinner. (Guests are not told this when they're invited.) It's not cooking that they demand, not cleaning up. L and H are life coaches! So each of us was invited to share something which made us grateful or hopeful... and then, over dessert, something which filled us with anxiety or despair. The first round was lovely, an amazing way to get to know people. The second not so much. I wondered if we were supposed to reach a nadir, a point where the sources of hope and gratitude started to curl around the edges of the sources of anxiety and despair, but there wasn't time. I was left with new friends but a discouraging sense of the difference of scale - sources of positivity were intimate or cosmic, those of negativity political, systemic or ecological.
My spirits were lifted by a photo e-mail from one of my nephews in Oz: "I made this Lego trophy when [my little brother] and I had a wrestling match, I won but he insisted that he won so I went to my room and made this trophy. The trophy used most of my yellow Lego pieces even though I realized later that most trophies like this are silver!" Gold!
