Leif, and a question.

"How have you come to this?"
He looks beyond her, eyes distant, and she realizes then that it is not a question she is called upon to answer, rather it is something he is asking himself, or some old self standing in the distance, amid the trees, and he will ask it again, later, when he feels the hard roll of axe handle in his hand: How have you come to this?
--Zoli, Colum McCann, 2006.

I'm enjoying this novel, recommended by someone here. Who put me onto it? Was it Freespiral? Ceridwen? Benshep? Whoever it was, thank you. It's a story about an artist, a culture, an attempt to catch a song in a cage of light and make it last. And then it's about the artist's right to destroy her work rather than have it used against her. I have another hundred or so pages to go.

Leif and I, friends since childhood, artists and wildish women, relentlessly hard-working, true to ourselves, fiercely independent, falling in love time and again but not holding onto a love, have watched each other come to this. Here we are, old. We didn't plan for this, we laugh. Beauty has had its way with us: the beauty of nature and of people, of light, of made things and improvisations, of those we have loved; the beauty of dreams that did not come true and a few that did.

How did we come to this? We fueled our candles with ecstasy and striving, with attempt, with self-blaming and trying again, trying harder. Burnt those candles to ash at both ends. She as a dancer. I as an actor and writer. Both of us as teachers, supporting our children, paying the bills and refusing to sell out. Now we have a little left, a little further to go, a little time to sit on a park bench or a log by the river. We ask ourselves if there is anything more we need to say, if a photograph might say it, or some small braid of words. Maybe just a smiling silence.

We understand each other pretty well. On these glorious blue-sky green summer days, we take it all in, we marvel at how surprising it has been, and then we each go home to a simple room, a good book, and a nap in the afternoon.