What is left for us now?

I am in between books right now, finishing one and making way for another: a sort of liminal space. What is striking to me on this day in particular (the day after Easter and mid global lockdown) is that the photos I am taking now fit peculiarly well into the theme I had chosen for my third book which I will be calling Spelling Bee: Locked Within/Locked Without (the name was decided upon long ago). The book itself will be tactile and visual (not just written). I wanted to document my hometown of Buffalo and its ruins and past through material objects. What I find as quite moving is that within all of this, we are experiencing a loss: a loss of the life that we knew before, a feeling of the loss that should have been acknowledged (our ecosystems and history), and most all of a loss of the feeling of being carefree and genuinely blessed by an abundance that may not return any time soon. I took a walk yesterday along the lakefront to one of the new parks that was built over the past five years in anticipation for Buffalo's newly planned waterfront. The ruins of these new spaces filled with hope show a particular moment of paradox. What is new is now old and now looked back upon as ":the moment". Not the future, but the past. The excitement we felt then was felt in the present moment. What is left for us now? in my opinion, we now do the real work of putting together what has been dismantled: putting it back together in the right way. It was a pivotal moment in history to see Andrea Bocelli standing in an empty piazza in front of the Duomo di Milano singing "Amazing Grace". As sad as these days are, they do bring me hope and the feeling that things will change. 

Finally.

"It is only after have lost everything that we're free to do anything." Chuck Palahniuk.