souvenirs

today, I got an email from a ward member in Santos and it was like getting a letter from across time. I can't imagine myself in a more different place than Brazil than where I am right now. (Well, okay. It's not that different.) But anyway, I was doing very different things than what i'm doing now. it's amazing--mind-boggling, actually--to think that I belong to two such different sets of people. And I realized something else after having received that short little email: we never totally lose things like places or people. We leave them, or they leave us, but we always take something of them with us, like a souvenir. I used to get so freaked out over loss. But I think--I just think--I may be mastering the art of losing. As Elizabeth Bishop says:

The art of losing isn't hard to master
though it may look like (write it!) like disaster