Renewal

Cooper Thornton
4 min readMar 29, 2024
Photo by Luke Porter on Unsplash

I stepped outside, App State t-shirt and rusty Carharrts. Pretty chilly. Stepped back in for my decades-old Columbia fleece jacket with the busted zipper. Reaching to comfort my self not so much a concern with style.

I drove Nicole to the airport at 4:30 this morning, listening to Public Radio’s discussion around the curse and blessing of Guyana’s burgeoning oil wealth.

This Easter, my girlfriend is away on retreat for a weekend of meditation, and spiritual growth with like minded believers. Rebirth, Renewal, Reconnection. They pray for the health of all creation. That all would know love and joy and peace. Not themselves first and then with whatever is leftover, others dividing and making do from the remains. But all equally and together.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu brought to the masses the word ubuntu. Siri’s dictionary defines it as “a quality that includes the essential human virtues; compassion and humanity.” The Archbishop more simply and profoundly defined it as a connectedness, that there is no me apart from you, nor you from me. I am because you are.

When Milo was a baby, not even two months old, he got meningitis. Laura was at work and I was at Dr. Fleiss’s with Milo and a fever that was very concerning. They sent us home with something to break the fever and with instructions to take a cool bath. When in the next hour the fever continued to…

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Cooper Thornton

Parent, Actor, People Lover, Observer, Writer and Most Often Happy Depressive in NC by way of LA by way of UK by way of BC by way of TN, where it all started.