Last Saturday I was in Amsterdam at a wedding celebration/birthday bash for family friends I’ve known since birth. It was the happiest of days, and a much-needed reminder of all the good that is still in the world. At the same time, twenty innocent lives were lost a few miles away. At moments like this, when life shows you its best and worst sides, it is difficult to find comfort. There are no words.
As we were driving up Market Street, I saw the same old dilapidated building I’d seen since my childhood. It was a tall brick-sided thing that seemed to jut startlingly out of the earth, tottering and yet somehow solid on its random corner. At a red light, Andy slowed to a stop and I snapped a photo of it on our way to get ready for the wedding. Part of it was covered with a vine whose leaves were in the process of turning red.
In the design that the vine made, this splotchy blot of red on worn brick, winding with various ventricles across the crumbling facade, I saw the heart of Amsterdam. Filled with happiness and joy, love and compassion, sadness and sorrow, anger and strife, it beat with all the tender might of our human experience. We will never make sense of it all, I thought, but together, like all those red leaves, maybe we can fill in our own hearts. With tears, with laughter, with memory, with love…
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