Carl Setzer

My mother died when I was 15. The impact lingers to this day. So this piece by Masaru Goto struck me deeply: “ …my mother died. I was with her. She is with me ” I love the intersection of poetry and photography. I want to explore that myself. A powerfully moving project.  

This article, over at Huffington Post, provides a different look at race in America. We’re Indian-American With Adopted White Children And Here’s What People Ask Us A lovely, gentle piece exploring a mother's love for her children, both from birth and from adoption. I particularly enjoy the voice she adopted. Some great lines in there. My favorite: "The hyphen will define us more than the terms themselves...", which tells a big part of the story about race in the United States right now. I doubt Ms. Iyer thought much about the social experiment she would be opening up. I expect, simply, that she and her husband followed their hearts and opened their homes. She opened my mind with her writing. I hope the same for you.

Holding yourself to a high standard and beating yourself mercilessly for not being perfect reflect two sides of a singularity. But they are not the same. One's the path towards self-destruction and one leads to a vibrant and vigorous life. Focus on self-care and maintaining realistic expectations, and the rest will naturally fall into place .

A simple thought: physical attraction may be felt towards those disliked, or even despised. Love is richer, deeper. Love seeks the happiness of its focus. Self sacrifice for the beloved: easy, actually pleasing, especially when successful. Generosity's birthplace is there. No more glorious sound exists than the laughter of those we love.

Listen for music's zeitgeist. Harmonics: voices intersecting, creating sounds not uttered, rather vibrations overlapping, the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Music offers us so very much, should we choose to listen. We may learn the value of each voice, whether frantically busy or quietly adding structure, all critical to the audio portrait of a piece. Each pitch and tone crucial to the landscape. Silencing one changes the whole. We must learn to value voices equally. This summarizes the commandment to love. Namaste!