Summer has arrived

Sunlight and sharp shadow. Relative heat, enough to notice: 87F/30.5C

Apart from a little grocery shopping, I am quietly at home, listening to Anouar Brahem’s new album* that honors a poem by Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish: “Where should the birds fly, after the last sky?” The poem ends, “Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.”

I’m starting again with the piano I have left gathering dust for a month. (I got discouraged with my slow plunking. Discouragement serves nobody, but I slip into it now and then.) And—

I’m reading Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There (2025). She writes in the introduction, “We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.”

I’m remembering what Solnit reminds me not to forget. The day Mandela was inaugurated as President of South Africa. “It seemed impossible,” he said then and Mamdani said last week, “until it was done.” Holding onto that idea by my fingernails.

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*Brahem and his group will be performing in Milan, Dublin, and Mannheim, and next year in Switzerland, for those of you who live near enough to hear him in person. I’ve admired him since I heard his first album in 1991.