Dear Michael,
My heart hurts today, learning you've left us. You were one of the rare ones, one who treated others with kindness and respect even as you disagreed with them. You taught me that lesson (though I fell short many times) and I came to see you, or better the press of your influence here, as some kind of gentling hand on our contentious heads.
I honor you with this poem by Emerson,
which you surely knew.
Which you surely lived.
All Return Again
It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not
die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.
Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals
and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the
window, sound and well, in some new strange disguise. Jesus is not
dead; he is very well alive; nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor
Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could
easily tell the names under which they go.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I'll remember you, Michael. |
