Three Graces 5 comments

25 Jan 2005 @ 05:24, by John Ashbaugh I keep in mind the thought that I’d like to come up with something for ncn. Yet I’m passing through a time that I guess can be described as the doldrums. Not exactly depression or anything quite so deep. More of a sense of emptiness, and a sense of directionlessness akin to looking down a trail which leads into the fog. A very dear friend who lives near Boulder, Colorado fell asleep on a heating pad three weeks ago, and woke up with a third degree burn on her back about the size of a videocassetee, so I talked with her quite frequently over the phone during the excruciating time she went through as she began to heal. She got her skin graft and is home now in the care of her mother and sister. The rest of the world disappears when you are thinking about things like that. My mother’s cat died about a week after new years. This was a cat she raised from a kitten, and he was her companion at home she could look after, especially since my father died five years ago. My mother is a good one for always taking care of living creatures. She takes a walk out in her back yard every day to leave some bread and perhaps some fruit for the birds and bunnies and squirrels. So here again, a loss, some sorrow, and pain have touched someone close to my heart. Then there was all that news of the tsunami, and my thoughts about its striking the place where I once lived. And then there is all of this neverending news about the evil and corruption that pervades the economic and political world, and I follow many of those insightful observations on ncn about all of this, and I feel empty. There are alternative places to live in Australia, just as there are on this continent, and maybe my time will come to be a part of one of those. Maybe my time will come to relocate, and maybe I will be washed away by the next tsunami. We thought we were on the verge of changing something in the late 60’s and early 70’s. In retrospect, how naive we were. The voices are there. I read them on ncn, and I read them all over the web, and in various print publications and books, and I think I would like to say something about all of this, but that is not my role, although I do get some points across and do make some of my students at school think in ways slightly different from what they are used to. So that is my contribution in that arena. Otherwise, I want to look beyond the suffering and the death and the madness, for it is coming upon us in ever increasing waves, and there is little to say that is going to change that. The only questions are when and how, and there are a hundred thousand pages on the web that will give you whatever prediction you might be partial to. I want to live with the hope for how things can be better. I want to live with the healing that we are all going to have to go through, those of us who live into the times of the next generation. I want to bury the dead with the sense of eternal spirit. I want to hope that the waves of destruction can in some sense provide a cleansing for the spirit of our human life. I like to take walks along canyon trails, through damp and misty forests, and along riverbanks at sunset, and snap a few photos along the way, picking out some little arrangement of the natural world, and fixing it, a frozen moment in time, that surely will melt, but for now, but for now, I can enjoy it for just a few more fleeting moments. May tomorrow bring a moment or two or three of joy to your heart, may whatever wounds you bear continue their healing, may the spirits you have laid to rest stay warm in your heart, and may all of your days find you with someone to care for. *-_/*

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