|
for Logan and Tracy |
|
from Carol |
|
for Logan and Tracy |
|
from Carol |
|
The written word usually doesn’t fail me. It’s easy to pick up a pen – or what passes for one in this age of electronic gadgets – and unleash a primal scream of outrage over the latest injustice or act of oppression. It’s easy to analyze data, regurgitate footnotes and rip efficient and concise sentences from the indifferent and dispassionate language center that clicks away in my brain. But this is different, and to write this I have to be in a different space, a space that I do not inhabit comfortably or speak of easily. And I begin this, knowing from the very first word, that it will be inadequate because you can’t capture a heart in a footnote and you can’t contain a life on a page. No one ever has – no one - not even the literary giants against which my own attempt will be very feeble indeed. That said, on February 23, 2005, we lost Logan Brooks. He was twenty-four. We could talk for a long time, if we wanted to, about his tireless activism, his boundless energy and his unrelenting optimism, hope and vision – all of which he shared freely with those whose lives he touched. We could talk about his passion for freedom and justice, and how he threw himself into every cause that would advance our evolution, as a species, into beings where community and love would rise irrepressible to the surface, trumping every meanness and cruelty that the planet has experienced in the few thousand years we have trod its surface. And we could talk about his ability to bring people together, to make the little islands we have created for ourselves intersect in new and creative ways. We could talk about all that, but tonight the past three days are still fresh in my mind and so I will remember how every place Logan went he planted a seed. And the seed contained infinite possibilities. And even though he was not able to say a single thing in his last three days on earth, he was still able to deliver to us a gift. It was the gift of community, solidarity and love. I don’t think I had ever as fully understood those concepts as I did all those long days and nights in the hospital waiting room because it was in this place, under these horrible circumstances we all were forced to stop – we stopped watching television, we stopped consuming fear and we stopped checking off our “to do lists”. We stopped thinking about the machinations of a vicious society, we stopped feeling powerless and we stopped searching for answers in the endless flow of information that traverses through our daily lives. Instead, in those last few days of Logan’s life, we learned to listen and to embrace and to put our hearts on our sleeves, as he did, for all the world to see. And we laughed and cried with people who had been total strangers. And somehow, in the end, the political became personal and the vision became real. In the end, it was all about love. And so was he. Logan, we will miss you, but we will carry your vision and we will take the seeds you planted and turn them into a forest that lives and breathes the community, the spirit and the light that you left in our hearts. Somewhere in the ether we know you are out there – not gone, just somewhere else. And in my mind’s eye, I can picture you asking the spirit beings, with perhaps just a touch of mischief, “Yeah, I know you’re light beings and all that…but are you really free?”
In eternal solidarity, |
