I am my father’s daughter – endowed with a love of ocean, salt breeze, sun, nature, an ability to sleep anywhere, anytime, and a pensiveness that broods contentedly. He modeled a love for people and taught my brother and me that all – and I do mean all – have worth. We were to see the best in them even if they wounded us and he was no stranger to the wounds of animosity. He taught me to look at nature with the eye of an artist. To appreciate color. To read broadly. When he died we had every National Geographic from 1938 to 1991 on shelves in chronological order. We all read them eagerly each month when they arrived, he from cover to cover I think.
Daddy loved every day. He said that as a child he was told “these are the best years of your life” and he thought, well – then I’d better enjoy them. Then as a teenager he was told, “oh, these are the best years of your life,” so he set out to enjoy them. And so on through the decades others would say variations of this. He was in his 40s when he first told me that secret and his words echo: enjoy every day. In his book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle writes, “When you accept what IS …every moment is the best. That is enlightenment.”
Ah…I smile…my enlightened daddy who dreamed of jumping from star to star, who had a two or three year friendship with a mockingbird, who drove like a race car driver when mama wasn’t in the car, who loved to laugh, who read Hebrew and Greek weekly as he prepared sermons, and who loved me as unconditionally as I think a human could love. My I live those lessons, love that deeply, and laugh in his honor. Always and forever…your little girl.
Just yesterday I was trying to remember Eckhart Tolle's name. . . .