coskran

Married to Amazement is both a memoir and a celebration of the life passages we all experience with a brush of wonder and amazement. It’s not a pollyanna approach, there is loss and error here, nobody escapes pain, but the foundational gifts of author Kathleen Coskran’s life have been wonder, through undeserved luck, she says, and an instinct for paying attention. Like Mary Oliver, Coskran too doesn’t ＂... want to end up having simply visited this world.＂

The first essay quotes a fellow Ethiopia Peace Corps Volunteer who, every day, spread his arms wide as they walked down ＂a clay road that sucked at our shoes in the rainy season and streaked our clothes with dust in the dry season,＂ and proclaimed, ＂So This is Paris!＂ The essays that follow celebrate the joy of becoming parent (with five children born in five countries on three continents), the love of travel, yes, but more importantly, the understanding that for her and her husband, Chuck, (also a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ethiopia) living and working, not just visiting, Kenya, China, Nepal . . . and Minnesota were the source of deep satisfaction and connection. She also includes essays that acknowledge and celebrate, ＂that final human experience, death.＂
She ends with the realization that the third Peace Corps goal, ＂to help promote a better understanding of other people on the part of Americans＂ was the gift, the amazing gift, that formed and transformed her life. ＂We speak different languages,＂ she writes, ＂eat different foods, have different practices and opinions, but we share this beautiful, fragile planet and must continue to learn, to see, and to listen to one another.＂

Those words are more important than ever in these fragile times.