a love story

I'm writing a quick note to say Dobrya-den (good-day or something like that) from the town that used to be Ekatrinaslav, Russia but is now Dnipopetrovsk, Ukraine. But they all speak Russian here.

It's hot. As in 40 degrees Celcius hot. We spent hours by and in the river Dnipr again today (did the same thing in Kiev the other day)just to be reasonably comfortable in the heat. But had a good chance to soak up the atmosphere of the town last night and today even though we haven't seen much of it.

Did a sukhavati ceremony the other day by the Dnipr River in Kiev and again today by the same river for my ancestors. Feels really, really good. Feels like the purification and release of the burden is occurring. And in it's place, love is just burgeoning. I'm discovering a new story about my family. It is a story of love. Not just a story of neediness and pain, not just a story of forgetting the old world and attaching to newer, faster commodities.

It's a story about a soft breeze by a river, the leaves waving in the wind, and two lovers meeting by the water to enjoy it all deeply. It's a story about loving many all at once, about conquering fear to love ardently, about striding across bridges to fall at the feet of the ones you love.

This story is all around me here. It is in the statues, the water, the story of why this city exists (General Putemkin's lover Ekatrina loved the island by the bend in the river - this is where we went swimming this moring - and so he built a church there for her, and a palace overlooking the island and the river for her. He also later (or earlier, I'm not sure) conquered the fort at Odessa (where we're heading to tonight on an overnight train) for his lover Catherine the Great (17th Century) from St.Petersburg and built it into what it is today - a multi-ethnic port with a magical air.

This story exists in all the painful stories of my family, all of which are based on love, and loving too many. The stories are embedded in my family history, and I have chosen, long ago, to change the way this story unfolds. It is so wonderful to be here, where that love seeminly originated, or at least I can taste tendrils of it in the hot air, the way the breeze moves the leaves of trees, the way the flowers bend in the heat, the way the water laps at the shore.