Air and Simple Gifts

And Yo Yo Ma’s wide smile and the seagulls high in the palest blue around the white Capitol dome, if you were watching on MSNBC. Twelve noon struck during this song, easily the most sublime moment of the inauguration, and one in which Barack Obama became president. This even before the oath so awkwardly offered by a man who surely had not voted for him, and so graciously received by this man who certainly had not voted for him to become Chief Justice. America!
But music carried the moment into time and into the space all around, an aural benediction that captured the power of the course of human events that followed. Words of power, words of pressure, words of grace. Hope and virtue; an air, and simple gifts.

Words to Live By

These things are old. These things are true.
And we are not to break with rash and brash entitled hubris those things that anchor us. That is what virtue can teach us. And we are better for listening to and hearing words that hold meaning like full fruit, and that are served in a cadence that itself recalls us to the time and place where our better selves were named, where and when we ourselves named those things which we need to hold to be better, and to be reminded over and across time to be better. That we deemed them to be self-evident does not mean we remember that they are. All the mighty truths and all the mighty words that we the people call our pole star are as ephemeral or as enduring as our intention to remember them. We are to remember that even in this exponential digital google age of trash and discard, we are defined by our deeds propelled by our beliefs. If we wreck and dismiss our ideals in a fit of pique or a convulsion of power and greed, we exist in a moment and then we are history; shattered atoms of a wasted and wasteful nation, an antipodal paradigm even in its mass fission, a polar opposite to the hard clear concentrated light of a star.
Thank you for saying it all, President Barack Hussein Obama. Belief, solidity, our touchstone for national bearings, our call to account for our stated principles. A clear-eyed, fair-minded, powerful, and authoritative assessment of our time and place. No apologies for truth, and no pretense about what was false. This was an inaugural address to us here and now, and its call for the ages was premised on the imperative to pick ourselves up and begin. Obama and his family in the colors from a prism on a clear and cold January morning model civility, decency, humanity, and certainty. We forgot what that looked like out in front of us. Yesterday he held up our truths for us and for the world to see. Like children faced with the broken heirloom, we need to own it, to fix it by using new glue, to renew what is timeless, and to live with that contradiction that calls us to account and to be better for it. And to make each other better for it. Dare I say it? Our new president said it yesterday. Yes we shall.