It's September. Labor Day weekend has passed. The kids are back in school. The pace picks up - despite nature's pace winding down. In one week the date will be 9-11. The classic images, the ones burned in our collective retina will begin this week - you know, planes crashing, exploding buildings, people fleeing down the streets in terror. Terror - the broad paintbrush of the past 7 years. You don't need me to drive these images of fear and national symbols of trauma deeper.
What I offer instead is a remedy - an antidote, written the week following 9-11-01. I offer it today at the beginning of this week where "they" will remind us repeatedly how unsafe we are. How insecure and vulnerable we all are in a world gone mad. True perhaps, but there's more to the story. There's always more to the story....
"I was to meet with a friend this morning, a midwife who never made it to our appointed time to meet. I assume she was probably busy at a birth with a mom and new arrival. It's good to remember that in times such as these, with the appearance of darkness overwhelming us, that Life keeps moving forward; babies are being born today - new hope, new breath, new life. We certainly have been wading through the other side of it all recently.
I picture you in my mind and heart, well and at peace and will hold that picture as we continue to wade deeply through our human muck. We truly are a strange species - capable of inflicting the darkest horrors and birthing the most tender beauty. Remember friend, we are not alone. I am here fanning tender embers of hopefulness and peace with my breath, as are others. The same breath that flowed through all our ancestors before, flows through and around each of us now and blesses the newly arrived who draw their first breath today.
BREATHE...
Share in that first breath of the newly born - breathe in the life, the precious life. Here, Now, Breathe..."
2 comments:
I grew up in fifties. I have never felt safe. We lived under constant threat from The Bomb. We used to have bomb drills that involved having us squat under our school desks, which we were led to believe would keep us from being killed by The Bomb. (I worried about my parents dying from The Bomb because they didn't have school desks to hide under.) Then there was Vietnam, civil unrest...well, the list goes on. I have never felt safe. But sometimes I feel happy in my little world. Sometimes I feel like I can breathe.
I grew up in all that too Sandi. It all blurred together in my child-mind: the communist red threat, cuba, nazis, bomb-shelters etc. As a youngster I would watch planes flying over and look for swastikas, so I would know when to run for cover.... My sense of history was sort of a "wrinkle in time."
We are well practiced in the stressful "watch and wait" - still to this day. At least if we add breathe to the watch and wait, we won't suffocate ourselves in the process.
It's like any good labor. Breathe......
Especially when they start bombarding us with the images - which will come up any day now.
When is the Republican convention over?
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