“And love dares you to care for

The people on the edge of the night

And love dares you to change our way of

Caring about ourselves

This is our last dance”

-David Bowie & Queen

“… the simple days, in fact, add up to a very rich life.”

-A very little snippet that I like from Baron Baptiste

A few work friends organized a weekly trivia night this past Fall. I didn’t go every week, but when I did I was surprised at how much I liked it. It felt nice to have a consistent thing to show up at and just be at with familiar people. One week one of the trivia questions was, “What year did Saddam Husein invade Iraq?” I swore it was 1991- the year my family moved to Georgia, but in fact it happened the year before that in 1990.

Many of us at the table were between the ages of 8 and 12 in 1990 and the question sparked a conversation about what our little minds remembered about both the war and life at that time. While I was experiencing my first year of life as a 3rd grader in the deep South, one of my favorite co-workers was growing up as a Buddhist in Sri Lanka. She vividly remembers her Catholic cousins being over for a visit at the time the war was starting. They were playing in her room and one of the cousins suggested they should pray for all the people being affected by the war. The Buddhist kids didn’t really know how to pray so they suggested meditating. And so, the group of Catholic and Buddhist cousins sat on the bed and prayed and meditated for the people in the war in Iraq.

That visual of those cousins sitting on the bed eyes closed together thinking and praying and caring about people they didn’t know in a war far away is just about one of the most beautiful things I can picture.