Flat & Interesting

Seeing Diamond Soccer Fields through the eyes of my parents yesterday, helped me embrace some of the local beauty of our lives which is both mundane and pervasive, and therefore, mostly invisible to us. The fields stretch on for a quarter mile in every direction, and the natural inclination is to focus all of your energy on the vigorous battle being waged by the reversible blue and yellow shirted competitors inside the white spray-painted lines, but if you lift your eyes for a moment and enjoy the sprawl of the fields, the variety of the people (sure they're mostly white and middle class, but to look at this sameness misses the best part: all the profound generations of struggle that preceded their arrival here, all the demons that had to be silenced, all the chaos that had to be fought through: just to get to this place in their lives, sitting on folding camp chairs with a few friends and families, watching blue and yellow shirts dart back and forth in big clusters of soccer dreams) you recognize that you are thickly braided with the hopes and dreams of these people...loose ties, but densely networked and suddenly the soccer fields, with all its suburban iconicity and embarassing homogeneity seemed not just wide, flat, & endlessly repetitive, but...interesting.