Posts Tagged ‘sympathy’
Embattled Planet
I do my best to send love out into our world, but lately it feels a little short, in terms of effectiveness.
We had a lovely time out to dinner with family in downtown Minneapolis last night to honor Julian’s birthday. I’ll give a happy shout out to Randle’s restaurant on the Nicollet Mall. Nothing pretentious about a straightforward menu and lots of sports on tv screens covering the perimeter walls.
This is the view I had coming home, and this is about as clear as it looked to my weary eyes:
During the long drive home, I was basking in the afterglow of the wonderful time we had, while also contemplating the attention grabbing headlines of catastrophic weather and geographic cataclysms. With hurricane Maria wreaking havoc in the Caribbean and the severe earthquake that occurred in Mexico, previous travails get overshadowed, yet are no less deserving of continued support.
From the challenges of renters forced to continue paying rent for unlivable properties in Houston and Florida in the aftermath of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, to the cholera outbreak in Yemen during their civil war, and the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya muslims in Myanmar, as well as everyday ongoing poverty and homelessness, there seems to be no end to the struggles around our globe.
I get to sleep in a comfortable bed, with a safe roof over my head, blessed with spectacular late-summer weather seeping in through an open window.
I don’t deserve to have it so good, and it makes it hard to fully immerse my mind in the blissfulness when others suffer so.
Sending love to all the aforementioned, as well as to all others with needs, known and unknown.
Would that it be that each loving intent we project out into the world would have influence enough to make some measure of difference, no matter what challenges others are facing.
Put more simply, I hope it helps.
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Today, Pausing
Today, we have all the ingredients for taking a pause from the multitude of news and projects facing us with relentless regularity: A Sunday; gray skies; soggy grounds; workshop aftermath; no plans.
I caught a moment of television news coverage reporting the latest synopsis of Hurricane Harvey this morning and was struck by the different perspective it presented from the minute-by-minute reality of what it must be like “on the ground,” so to speak.
They wrapped it up in such a neat little package of a few minutes, and then moved on with their regular scheduled broadcast.
It felt like, “Yeah, it is bad, but… whatever.”
Meanwhile, I’m wondering, if the municipalities are inundated with emergency response requests, the power is out, the water continues to rise, tornadoes repeatedly threaten, boil water orders are in place, toilets are becoming useless, and catastrophic amounts of rainfall will continue for days… how are people going to cope?
It doesn’t wrap up nicely in a breaking news update.
Reading a portion of 911 calls with one after another requests for rescue from families with infants and elders trapped by rising water gives just a tiny sense of the immediate emotions involved as the drama continues to play out.
This can’t be conveyed in the short news briefing that so quickly ends to be followed by the next inconsequential distraction.
I don’t mean to imply that I fault the updates. On the contrary, the updates are valuable for what they can provide. I am just boggling over the canyon of differing perspective I notice from them.
Just as I am boggling over the Sunday calm settling over us today, with no pressing demands forcing our decisions, in juxtaposition to what is simultaneously going on in the Houston area.
If I end up puttering with the silt fence by our swamped soil runoff spot today, I will be certainly be thinking about how our predicament here compares with what is going on in Texas.
It definitely gives pause.
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Feeling Sympathy
This morning we are feeling sympathy for the people who are experiencing the full impact of hurricane Harvey along the Gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana.
At home, the welcome signs are out for another Wintervale workshop, but the weather is anything but welcoming. It is wet, wet, wet, with gray skies and soggy soil.
It is not conducive to our outdoor activities with the horses, but it is so far from the devastating situation unfolding to our south, that we feel no justification in moping about it.
May the people under the catastrophic flooding of Harvey experience peace amid the turmoil and relief, somehow, sooner than they expect.
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Relative Something 