thoughts

Honestly, it looks as if the greenish baby is a bust. Sad, that the next-to-last Sunday Add-A-Caption should be so bereft of your smart captions. But I can't think of a single one, so I don't blame you. Anyway, I'll let it run for a while and see if you can dig anything up.

It's sunny and lovely and Mom and I are enjoying thirty minutes of quiet before the next thing. Life is so full of "next things" that it's hard to just stay in a moment--a cliche, I know, but true for all of us. I can't seem to reconcile all the pieces of things right now--the devastation in Japan, the thoughts that I am fortunate to sit down at my kitchen table, drink tea, pour milk into my cereal, and the realization that people have to eat and grieve at the same time. Looking at the images yesterday, I was struck by a man's face, crumpled in despair as he read a list of the names of the dead; I wondered, was he mourning a specific person, his wife or child or mother, or was he just overwhelmed by the sheer weight of those names? And that man, with worlds of loss inside of him, will have to stand in line for food, because he is alive and still needs to eat. It seems as if some other reality entirely should descend when a whole country is shaken and torn--God should send a respite from hunger and thirst, a tent you may enter where you will be healed completely.

And what material is sure, if not the earth that holds us as we walk and run and sleep? Writers point to the sky; that is the one thing that is steady and expansive above us, and I know that during a period of sadness and worry I found great solace in the sky. I was sitting in a parking lot, overcome by heaviness, and I looked up at a late summer sky, so blue and detached from all my petty doings, and I felt comforted. I wish all that we love, our children and life partners, our parents, our friends, gardens, homes, the smell of our mothers cooking and the sound of our father's laughter, our ability to love it all--I wish it were all as sure as the sky, that we could awaken and know all those things would be waiting for us, because they always have been and they always will.