I don’t know if my earlier post really needs explaining or not. But I wrote it, and I posted it, and then I thought about it. And I thought about my reference to Mother Nature and her wild ways, and then I thought about the many, many destructive winds and waves and quakes that have come our way in the recent months and years. And I became worried that it, meaning the post, might seem insensitive or offensive.
There’s no doubt about it--we have seen a lot of clouds and shaking and ripping apart in our natural world lately. It seems like more than usual, and it has been on my mind. I don’t know how to make sense of these things. I do know that storms have to blow through sometimes to make room for change. Where I grew up, there were often Spring tornadoes that would whirl through our town and wreak havoc on the landscape. But afterwards, the old, dead, tired trees would be uprooted, leaving room for new things to grow in their place.
I know this is true, but then I can’t reconcile that idea, that idea of a natural rhythm between old and new, with all the people that have perished in these earthquakes and storms and floods. I cannot see the reasoning behind such a loss of life.
Because my mind can’t understand it, it instead turns inward. It starts to think about internal landscapes, how our minds are, like the Earth, constantly changing and evolving. (We like to think of both our minds and the planet as static green pastures, but that is not the case.) And I imagine the work I’m doing in my own mind, and what a storm like that might do to its mountains and cliffs and valleys. What deep and buried things it might uncover. How it might speed up this process of excavation, of uncovering, that I’m working on. That all of us are doing as we live our lives and search for meaning.
And that’s where that post came from.
And in the meantime, I still don’t have answers about those real storms, the ones causing so much death and destruction. But I do have prayers for those families and survivors, prayers for health and peace and a safe place to sleep. And I offer them here.
