Family

I just returned from a week out East with family.  It was an odd mix of overstimulating and busy and quiet  and slow.  It was good.
I found it interesting to watch the reflection of our family's genes, in all their different permutations, over the generations.  I saw my dad, almost 87, rigid and anxious yet wanting to want to get back on the self care wagon so he can continue caring for and snuggling his wife, and the marriage of a nephew who is obviously willing to give his soul to take care of his new bride who is recently blind.  We Pipers love to caretake, and vary in our skill levels of self care.  Each family member has his or her own take on the themes of creating projects, often around food and self sufficiency, athleticism, music, but with a large dose, for the most part healthy, of being of service to others.

But my Family is not only my root stock, it's also the folks I love who I've chosen to graft onto my life and share my life force with.  Gil's family has become mine.  Though we are very different by our nature/nurture inclinations, they profoundly enrich and feed my life, as I hope I do theirs.  Sometimes in my busyness I haven't relaxed into the openness and acceptance/curiosity to fully experience their world, but I want to; they're my family.

I returned to Wisconsin, and immediately was struck by how loving and generous my wonderful circle of Friends/family are.  Friends are the family I choose and though we don't share the same inborn life habits, their gifts support me, shift me, strengthen parts of me which may not be as strong as theirs are.

I became aware out East, that though we can get on each other's nerves big time, and though it's so easy to be critical of each other (it's so much easier to judge our own weaknesses in our sibs), seeing our family themes played out through many lives is comforting.  Just as I've been thinking that I need to shift from focusing on Gil as a particle, with all his specific in time attributes, to Gil as a wave, rippling through all the lives he touched,  so too I can feel all of my families influencing and carrying me forward into the future.
Progress.