With the election only 5 days away, I'm hoping until then I can hold on to the inspiring attitude I got yesterday from Rachel Naomi Remen. I've still got the afterglow--feeling that each of us, in our own ways, can help to impact someone else.
Clearly the universe wanted to be sure I got the point---because the universe immediately followed up by sending a second person to remind me of the same message. I don't know if my nephew Max has ever heard of Rachel Naomi Remen. But he's staying in our house and I can ask him tomorrow when I get up. He lives in LA and seems to end up here only for weddings--one this weekend and one last year when his brother got married in our backyard.
Max is not on V's side of the family, or on mine--but on my first husband's. I've grown much closer to H's side of the family since H and I divorced. (You can draw your own conclusions from that--and assume that H just dodged a bullet...) I wasn't part of the family yet when Max was born with congenital heart disease--which has shaped his life. And he draws on that to touch and change the lives of others.
This book pulls it all together--his talents as a photographer, a writer, and a human being. All I could add is to click on this link---since everything is beautifully told in Max's photographs and words--the words of some of the 25,000 kids born every year in the US with congenital heart disease. The cover is Max's X-ray which shows the pacemaker put in when he was 8 years old.
In addition to this book Max is a fantastic professional photographer and writer of his own blog, llinked here--which is the first one I ever read, even before I had any idea of what a blog was.
And now I'm going to stop because Max is very humble and he has no idea I"m writing this and I'm thinking it could be awkward for me when he wakes up tomorrow and finds out. But I'm sure he'll just smile and forgive me for bragging about him.
The thing is--Max never signed up for this but his heart ended up at the center of his life in more than the obvious way. To a doctor, Max's heart has a mechanical defect--a medical problem. But to another human being like me, Max's heart is full of love, and perfect.