I sit here in the early hours of the morning the day after my city was attacked, and I am filled with a deep, immutable sadness.

I sat in visceral shock as the first reports of explosions hit my twitter feed. I thought at first it was some kind of cruel joke — the kind twitter is unfortunately known for, but as the reports began streaming in and the images started to hit the web, I had to grab something to hold on to. Boston was my HOME, I grew up seeing that skyline. The Marathon was a time to come together, to celebrate, to welcome the brighter days as we emerged from the cold dark winter. And, in an instant I watched as that peace and joy disappeared into the chaos, fear and shock that accompanied two explosions near the end of the Boston Marathon.

I watched as my Twitter and Facebook feeds exploded in the sudden “We are all Bostonians, We are all Americans” and I don’t know if it’s the disconnect that comes from the quick division that came after the attacks on 9/11, of the building nationalistic rhetoric, or of the racist comments that came streaming across the internet, but I just couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t find comfort in the sea of togetherness. I did however find faith in the actions of our nations first-responders, in those who ran towards the blast, those who put the well being of their fellow citizens above their own.

Right now, at 2AM the morning after Boston was attacked, I am starting to feel a sea of emotions — sadness, fear, hope…

I am sad, sad because once again we realize how illusory our  “security” actually is. Sad because once again we watched as senseless violence ripped a hole in our world, sad because the type of violence we saw take place in Boston today takes place almost daily in other parts of our world.

Fear because after September 11th, I witnessed my country send my peers off to fight a war that was not their own. Fear because I am watching once again as the hatred and fear of Muslims is galloping back to the forefront of our society, fear because the response I have seen has been one of seeking to place blame, not to focus on coming together to help those that were injured or killed –instead to focus our blame on who took these brutal actions and how we can bring them to JUSTICE.

Hope that maybe, just maybe we have managed to learn from our past and we can begin to focus on the real task of helping those whose lives have been forever altered. Hope because of those who didn’t think twice and chose to run to the aid of their fellow citizens. Hope that we can maybe just maybe come out of this somewhat intact.

Wherever this country chooses to go, I choose to move forward with love and compassion. And though I am sad I know that the only way to push forward is with hope and faith in my home state.

My heart is in Boston tonight.

There is an inspirational story that has been floating around the Internet for some time that I never really paid attention to until recently. It is the story of someone who overhears a father and daughter at the airport saying goodbye and wishing each other “enough”. Perplexed, the storyteller stops the father to ask him what they mean, by “enough” to which the father explains that he is old and that his daughter lives far away so the next visit his daughter makes will most likely be for his funeral. The old man continues to say:

“When we said ‘I wish you enough,’ we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with enough good things to sustain them,” he continued and then turning toward me he shared the following as if he were reciting it from memory.
“I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright. I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more. I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive. I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger. I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting. I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess. I wish enough “Hello’s” to get you through the final “Good-bye.”

This story has been sitting heavily in my mind and my heart over the last few days, as I reflect on the relationship I had with my Grandmother, the direction my life is moving and the strange interconnectedness of everything that has happened in the past week.

On the morning of Monday, March 18th, I woke up to a text message from my dad. It was the message I had been dreading and expecting for some time. As the sun rose that morning, my grandmother had passed away. It is strange that as much as you can expect something like this, you can never prepare yourself for the intense feelings of loss and disconnection from the universe at large.

My grandmother was a strong woman, someone who didn’t put up with anyone’s crap. She fought for her family, and at times served as a second parent to me when things grew too heated at home – and anyone who knew me as a teenager knows that those were not rare occasions. I can’t tell you how blessed I was to have shared some time on this planet with her and to learn the things I have in the too short time we shared together.

One of my mom’s favorite quotes is a John Muir quote that goes something like

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”

As I have grown up, I haven’t been able to help but marvel about how accurate this observation is. And as I look back on this story that has been running through my head over the past few days, it is the last line that I feel is pulling at me the most: “I wish enough “Hello’s” to get you through the final ‘Good-bye.’”

Because, as I have been struggling to deal with how to deal with this huge loss, I have also been working towards building a new future for myself and working on a great new “Hello”.

Last week, I formally accepted a position with a new national campaign called Caring Across Generations. This move, for me is huge. I have been involved in electoral campaigns on some level or another for the past decade; this shift away from electoral work is as unexpected for me as I am sure it is for many of my peers. But, as I was lying in bed recovering from two major surgeries, I had plenty of time to think about what direction my life was going in and reason through how difficult the past year has been for me building the motivation to work to elect people into a system where they can’t really accomplish anything meaningful – don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe in electing progressive champions, I just feel I am better served building the capacity of the elected officials constituency.

The decision to take the job with Caring Across Generations was not one that was easily made, I found myself in the odd position of having three job offers at the same time, each offer with an organization that I would love to have worked with or supported. In the end my decision to join the team at Caring Across boiled down to three points.

1.) The team that Caring Across has built is one that I know I can learn so much from,

2.) Caring Across is engaged in not just shifting a political discussion they – we, are working on bringing about a cultural shift in the way American’s think about aging and disability,

And,

3.) For the last few months of her life, my grandmother was able to spend her time at home thanks in no small part to a home health aide who spent a few hours a day helping her do tasks around the house and move around the house.

This person who I have never met was able to be there with my grandmother in the twilight of her life and give her the comfort of spending her last days in the house she and her late husband built together. How can I, when presented with the ability to fight for the rights of thousands of people like this individual, turn that down?

The simple answer is I can’t, and I didn’t.

America is facing what the media has called the “silver wave”. Every 8 minutes someone turns 65, which means that by 2020 there will be 55 million people aged 65 and older in America. We are rapidly approaching a time when more American’s than ever before need professional care service and the fact is we don’t currently have the capacity to handle the growing population of care consumers, forcing compromises to the quality and dignity of care provided. So we need to start to have a conversation now about how to provide quality care and how to do it at a fair wage, with employment protections for our caregivers.

During his first campaign President Obama said something that forms part of the foundation of my political belief:

“One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.”

This is what needs to happen; we need to start having conversations with our families, then our communities and eventually with the entire nation. This is one part of what I hope to work to accomplish with Caring Across Generations.

I am not going to lie, this shift terrifies me, but at the root of everything I’ve learned, everything I believe is that true community organizing, true movement building transcends electoral, issue based and cultural campaigns. I have a lot to learn, and I think, I hope there are some things that I bring to the table.

I thought long and hard about how to talk about my grandmothers passing here, how to best honor the life she has led, the path she showed me to move forward, and while I struggled with the idea of putting both of these major life events in a single post, I couldn’t find a way to separate these events, because it was my grandmothers experience that led me to want to do this specific work, and while losing her hurts in so many ways and I know that I will miss her for the rest of my life, I can think of no better way to honor her, to honor that person who could be there for her when I couldn’t to do the dignified work of helping her to live life the way she should, and to leave the world where she wanted.

I miss you Grammy. I miss you so much.

Onward and upward.

My mom loves sand. Travel anywhere, and her only request is that you bring her back a jar or two of the grain sized sediment. At first look it’s kind of odd. I mean really. Why would someone want me to bring them back a jar of ground up rocks? But then, it is my mom, the earth loving, environment defending, tree hugging, compost slinging, wetland saving, science teacher.

If you ask her why she wants sand her whole face lights up, and I mean LIGHTS up. She will start telling you about how sand can tell you stories. Stories about the bedrock it came from and of the creatures who have given pieces of their lives to that place. She will tell you about the history of Pangaea. How the earth was once so different and how even though it’s different in form it’s still the same rock. In a small pile of sand, my mom can see the history of the world.

My mom likes to say she has always been a scientist. That we are all born scientists. And while I agree that yes, she is a scientist, she is so much more than that. My mom is and has always been a teacher, an explorer, a philosopher and a caretaker. She doesn’t believe in simply observing. She is driven to discover. And I can’t tell you how much I admire her for that.

When this country was founded, we treasured discovery, we revered those crazy enough to be curious. Somewhere along the way, we got lost. We started placing value on people who could complete rote tasks, people who could add and subtract, people who didn’t ask questions, who simply walked forward and didn’t stop to wonder or question anything. That needs to change. We need to reward curiosity, to encourage diversity, to cherish those who see beyond the surface. It’s time to take this country out of neutral.

In 2012 we saw a record number of progressive victories:

• The Re-Election of President Obama

• The election of Tammy Baldwin to the United States Senate

• The election of Elizabeth Warren to the United States Senate

• In Maryland and Maine, Gay Marriage was legalized at the ballot boxes

• In Minnesota a discriminatory, homophobic amendment was defeated at the ballot boxes, and in Washington State, voters upheld a law passed by the legislature which legalized gay marriage.

Each of these victories seemed unreachable even two years ago. It has taken the combined effort of millions of people and over 1 billion dollars raised and spent over the past 18 months to bring us this far.

Now, it’s time for us to refocus and look at what is next.

Because none of the amazing progressive leaders we have elected will be able to live up to their potential if they don’t have an army of committed Americans standing at their sides.

Because the last time we took our eyes off the ball, we saw a Republican uprising of the likes we have never seen.

Because we need to work to get money out of politics, to change the dialogue of division and allow America to truly achieve her potential.

We are going to have to keep fighting to maintain the progress we have achieved and keep moving forward. together. We can’t take our eyes off the ball now. It’s halftime in America, and the Progressive movement is just. getting. started

How can you put into words the impact someones life has had on your own? As hard as I try I keep coming up short. Which is discomforting for me because words are my everything. When people fail me, when situations fail me, words are always there for me to pick me up or put me into my place.

And perhaps that alone is the thing I can carry with me as I leave to go home on Saturday, as I leave to say goodbye to someone who has shaped my life in more ways than I can say, in ways that I am still coming to understand.

My grandmother was never someone remarkable to those outside my family. She will never have her name written in the books of history as an influential leader. She spent most of her life working at Raytheon — maybe if I took more time to listen I would know what it was she did exactly. I know she had surgery on her leg when my dad was younger because she was in a motorcycle accident. I know that she loved my grandfather more deeply than any love I have ever seen. I know that she has stood by my father through thick and thin and defended him even when everyone knew what he had done was wrong. I know that she taught me more about life than I could have ever learned from a book. I know that even when I didn’t like her very much, I still loved her, still love her. I know that she loves Christmas, but she loves the look on the faces of her grandkids as they open the gifts she has meticulously selected for them even more. I know that when confronted with the seemingly insurmountable odds of single motherhood she soldiered on and though she wasn’t perfect she fought hard to make sure her kids were okay. I know that she truly believes that the family she has built is her greatest accomplishment. I know that even though we didn’t always see eye to eye on everything she always tried to meet me where I was at, and that she respected my beliefs — even if they weren’t her own. I know that she encouraged my love of words, she encouraged my love of language and she encouraged me to just love.

I know that boarding this flight on Saturday is going to be one of the hardest things I ever do. I’m really, really bad at goodbyes. I am taking some time over the next few days to look at some of the many lessons I have learned from her. So far the list I have isn’t large in size, but it’s huge in looking at what I know about myself.

1.  You stand by your people.
2.  Love as deeply as you can while you can.
3. Family. Is. Everything.
4. You are never too old for a hug
5. Receive gifts with grace, but give gifts with joy
6. Cherish the time you have while you have it
7. Take as many vacations as you can, life is short.
8. If you love something, do it.
9. Don’t listen to the voices that tell you you can’t do it. Just do it.
10. You don’t have to like someone, even if you love them.
11. Say sorry when you can.
12. Never remove the word love from your vocabulary

So, I can’t really put into words the immense impact this life has had on my own. But I can try. And I can try to reach to become the person she wants me to, but I can do it in my own way and do it in style.

Thank you for the time I’ve had Grams, it hasn’t been long enough, I really hope you can make it to Christmas, I really hope this isn’t my final chance to say I love you. But if it is, know that I mean it and know that I plan on making the most of the time I have here on this amazing rock.

Love ya.

“Never say good-bye because good-bye means going away, and going away means forgetting.” – Peter Pan