and a voice to sing with

i've recently finished reading the Memoir of Joan Baez--"And A Voice to Sing With." i have always been facsinated with her music, and her life. she has done so much to end violence in this world that seems to rock on the edge of constant tension and pain. i took a vietnam literature class in college, and while i was often broken over the reality of war, i don't think i've ever been as touched as i have been by Baez's experience in North Vietnam where she was visiting for good will and peace. the first time she cried in vietnam, she writes:

"Well, I had scratched the surface. I wondered what was really going on inside of me. I wondered about the children who spent their lives ducking bombs. The ones I'd met seemed very stable. Perhaps it was better to have something real to deal with than to conjure up, as I had, symptoms and phobias all of your childhood. Here was the difference I'd thought so often about, between vicitms of ourselves and victims of circumstance. me and my years of therapy. Me and my friends who went in and out of psychiatric hospital, trying to decide whther to live or die. And here, where teh children had always known war, perhaps here life was a little more precious...Perhaps there was no time for phobias here on the battlefield" (Baez, 1987, 210).

This is common comment from my close Israeli friends as well. They often comment in disbelief at the antics of young people in America...children in Israel don't have time for this. They are preoccuppied with grieving loved one blown up on a bus, or cousins gunned down during their required military service. How have we become so pacified with video games and consumeristic materialism that we forget to celebrate family and simple joys of living?

Baez also writes about Christmas spent grateful for a 24 hour cease fire by the US. She writes: " All the stories about Christmas have been written. They are of abounding love, sacrifice, rebirth, and forgiveness. They are about children in their time, their joy, their magic. Every year they are told again and again, and they are fresh and warming to the souls of the weary and old. They become true even if they are only wondrous fantasies. Because it is the one time in the year that those of us who celbrate it have an unwritten alibi to be nicer to each other. An extra inch or two of love. Christmas to me is exquisite." I think in some ways this is how I felt this year. Knowing that my family is about to change forever with marraiges and births....it was the last of my childhood family. And now, more exquisite moments to come...