Our Empty Nest

The long-awaited empty nest has finally arrived … though it's odd to say that because it seems more like something has left than that something has arrived. During the last 2 weeks in August we helped one daughter move across the NEU campus, to start her year as a "Middler", and we moved our youngest daughter off to RWU where we took part in this most elegant convocation — a traditional RWU has that neither of us had ever heard of before. And all that has left us with what we've long known was coming but are only just beginning to fathom: our very own Empty Nest !!     I am struck by the juxtaposition of profound saddness, for the loss, and giddy excitment for what's yet to come for my sweetie and I. YMMV as in my friend Simonne's "Empty Nest" article.

This morning, as I sat pondering this tantalizing new chapter in our lives, I opened up this month's UU World (check out my Unitarian Universalist connection) and decided to share the following quote from it:

Douglas Steere, a Quaker teacher, says that the ancient question,"Who am I?" inevitably leads to a deeper one — "Whose am I?" — because there is no identity outside of relationship. You can't be a person by yourself. To ask this deeper question is to extend the context far beyond the little self-absorbed self, and wonder:
"Who needs you?" "Who loves you?" "To whom are you accountable?"	"To whom do you answer?" "Whose life is altered by your choices?" "With whose life — whose lives — is your own all bound up, inextricably, in obvious or invisible ways?" —The Rev. Victoria Safford

See what happens to empty nesters ? — They start thinking too much !!