Michael's Corner

Ever since the advent of the twenty-four-hour-a-day cable news cycle, America has altered her visual trajectory: we no longer look inward at are communities; all eyes, since the late 1990s, are focused on Washington D.C.; it’s up with macro and down with micro. The result? Communities have gone uncared for, reduced to localities our houses happen to sit in, and they carry on with a minimal amount of involvement. The animus over politics since we finished exhaling after 911 has festered and grown; we’ve morphed into the United States of Petty Grievances – a nation that obsesses on the national and ignores the local.

Communities require engaged people willing to pierce the ever-ossifying collective to find truth and beauty in the individual. If we cannot LOVE irrespective of politics, relationships will go unnurtured, children ungoverned, men and women will continue leading separate lives, and communities will die on the vine. The crisis is reversable, but it won’t be a top-down initiative; it’s a bottom-up process. Couples with a mission for their lives is what will improve spaces called “communities,” not individuals reaching for “false life preservers” such as identity politics.

My wife and I are opposites: She was military; I was civilian. She was from the South; I’m from the North. She grew up on an air force base; I grew up a city rat from Philly. Yet, we looked past our differences into our souls and formed a community of two. Before long, we grew our community, nestled inside a larger one. Our effort inspired me to write a piece I keep on a static page titled Essays. Its essence is love, faith, and perseverance, otherwise bedrocks for building relationships, nurturing our shared humanity, and other components that strengthen a community’s fiber:

LOVE POURS FROM HER CHALICE

By

Michael DeStefano

What is love but a wonder countless poets have sought to express—an esoteric abstraction binding human consciousness with an unbroken thread, weaving an ever-broadening tapestry. Or is there more to an exploration we all seek and crave?

     In his lifetime, a man will encounter more women than he can ever take the time to know intimately. Has he the predilection to love any one of them? Is our shared humanity an ineffaceable mechanism for falling in love arbitrarily? Are those we love placed in our path by a power occupying a province beyond our earthly grasp, or is love as random as a fluttering snowflake settling onto a blade of grass?  

     I do not profess to know even a single mystery to a universe of many wonders. The following is all that my mortal mind allows me to grasp, and for it, I am eternally thankful: Love of My Life, I was born to adore you, serve you, worship you, keep you safe, bring you happiness, or die trying.

     We have known love in the past. Each time, the thrust of its lure failed when colliding with the burden of responsibility. Whenever the world of wearing influences finds its way to our bosom, we overcome it, strengthen, and ascend to a higher plateau. Our bond has never frayed or faltered; it has and shall remain unbreakable, for neither of us was a snowflake whose fluttery descent brought them to a blade of grass. Love of My Life, through raging storms to bursts of sunshine, we soared, for we were destined to guide each other in this lifetime. And thus, I pray that I am as nourishing to your soul as you have so steadfastly been to mine.  

     Love of My Life, our love endures; its ethos traverses the idyllic and all that is possible; its breadth transcends the poet and the pragmatist, the spiritual and the intellectual; it stops time and soars to lofty dominions; its journey clings to commitment as the soul does immortality. Until death do us part and beyond, I shall move, see, breathe, rejoice, and love under the wings of the angel the world has gifted me. I now and shall forever drink from your chalice.

Back on point: We reap what we sow. To improve a community, we need adults willing to nurture a world that looks like this:

So that it can grows to become something that resembles that:

Not that:

The adults in the middle photo probably weren’t wringing their hands worrying about who the parents of those children voted for; their goal was simply to provide COMMUNITY SERVICE. Commit yourself to loving your partner, devote yourselves to a child or children, and adopt a role outside the home that helps your community flourish. It doesn’t have to be major or heroic, just follow the rubric, it takes a village.