Saturday, September 30, 2017

WE ARE ALL CITIES



by Mary Elizabeth Raines, (c) 2014


We are all cities.

We have downtowns with amazing and unique architecture. 
Our friends are invited to ride down classy, tree-lined streets lined with the gorgeous homes of the rich.
The gardens in our cities are lush and well tended, impressive places of shade and rest and loveliness.
There are cops to keep us safe, and huge banks to protect our wealth.
We have art galleries spilling with color, stalwart stone museums that organize and record our fragile history, and fascinating restaurants brimming with heady scents and tastes to nurture us. 
Sometimes we string festive lights on our trees and streets and throw parties.
These are the parts of us that we tend to show to others. Especially prospective lovers.
Visitors are very impressed.

There are other places in our cities, thoughhidden, crumbling, and even shameful spots. Nobody is immune. Nobody’s city is entirely beautiful and entirely safe. 
All of us have pockets of crime. 
Slums. 
Rats in the subway. 
Roofs caving in.
There are corners where drug dealers and psychopaths lurk, and unsafe neighborhoods, and here and there, leaking sewage spewing disease. 
Somewhere in everyone is a derelict pushing a rusty shopping cart who curses at all the passers-by.

Yup, that’s part of who we are as well.

Not one soul on earth has a perfect city. 
Not one person exists without a street they would prefer to hide. 

Nor is anyone’s city entirely evil.
Does not the most hardened criminal soften like a little boy when he eats an ice cream cone, or weep at his grandmother’s funeral? May not the drunken prostitute pause and look in rapture and longing at the full moon?


Do not love only the pretty parts of the city that that is another, or is you. See it all and embrace the totality — the complex miracle of all that we are. For we are all cities.

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About Me

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Mary Elizabeth (Leach) Raines is the author of a collection of quirky short stories ("The Man in the GPS and Other Stories"), novels ("UNA" and "The Secret of Eating Raspberries"), and nonfiction ("How to Help and Heal with Hypnosis: An Advanced Guide to Hypnotism" and "The Laughing Cherub Guide to Past-Life Regression: A Handbook for Real People.") In addition to writing, Mary Elizabeth teaches hypnosis as the director of the Academy for Professional Hypnosis Training, speaking at conferences and leading workshops across the USA. She is a columnist for "The Journal of Hypnotism," and in the past she was a newspaper reporter and features writer. She has won a number of awards for her writing. Mary Elizabeth attended New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in the 1960s as a piano performance major. Later she pursued independent film studies at UW-Oshkosh. In her free time, Mary Elizabeth plays the piano, creates fractal art, cooks, paints, dabbles with computers, acts, gardens organically, and keeps bees.