Tracy and Alexa

I spent the day today with my vivacious cousin Tracy, my father’s brother’s daughter, on the left. This picture was made Monday when I met Tracy and her brilliant daughter Alexa for breakfast. Alexa is a vulcanologist who spent five years doing her doctorate at the University of Wellington, in New Zealand, and is now studying the behavior of volcanoes all over the planet, which is what has brought her here. I had never met Alexa till Monday, but I hope we’ll get together in the future and talk more. I only met Tracy in 2009 at a large family gathering, so this is our first chance to get to know each other. I didn’t post this double portrait of them on Monday because I got a migraine that afternoon and couldn’t be online. Then today (I’m writing this on Thursday) when I spent the day with Tracy I didn’t take any pictures at all.

Tracy whirrs with energy like a self-powered generator. She’s a very successful business executive, and she lives in a world I know nothing about, where terms like “best practices,” “management style,” and “audit” mean something I’ve never had to understand. As Tracy talked animatedly about her business, it dawned on me that there are more people in business than there are in the arts and academia, that there are millions of people who use language in ways I don’t use it and who see the world through lenses I’ve never looked through. She uses some of the language I use: compassion, understanding, generosity. But she moves in circles I’ve never touched. She says her main goal in life is “service,” and I say the same, but we conceive of what we do in very different ways. We dress, socialize, talk, and dream as if we might come from different countries at least, maybe even different planets, and yet there is a genuine connection and mutual respect that leaves me slack-jawed with wonder. It is in some ways terrifying, in some ways thrilling, to peer into her world and to realize how utterly foreign it is to me.

Tracy is a passionate advocate of the Landmark Forum. She says it has transformed her life, her relationships, and her vision of the world. She calls it "a conversation about possibility.” She was here to visit her daughter, and they both left tonight to fly to California to do a new Landmark course together, one that incorporates brain research into its teaching about human behavior. I’m curious to hear about their experience in the new course. I did some Landmark Forum courses in the 90s and was ambivalent about them, rather like Diana Odasso in this essay in the Huffington Post. Tracy says the courses have changed completely since the 90s and that I should open to the possibility that I could become a happier, more creative, and more effective person if I took a refresher course. I am sitting with my resistance and examining it.