First there is the personal crisis of a high risk delivery that ends with your newborn baby in the NICU. Then the winds come. And the water. A national disaster occurs outside your child's hospital bed. Your home destroyed. Family scattered. Unreachable.
The water rises.
The evacuation of the tiniest patients begins.
And you don't know where they took your baby.
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Earth, water, air, trees: These are the elements we all need
Earthquakes, fires, floods, disease: Will we hear our mother's pleas?
I've been hearing this refrain for the past few years, juggling ideas to turn it into a longer poem but Elias cries or the phone rings and I return to the task of daily living, forgetting the universal concerns that plague my subconscious.
Then the great tsunami washes over me and I cant ignore the images of children swept from a mother's embrace. But there are meals to cook, gardens to sow, and dishes to wash so I forget about the second wave and return to normalcy.
Until Hurricane Katrina forces me from my denial that the earth is changing, people are dying, and I can't pretend that everything is alright.
The news hits when I turn on the computer. Tens of thousands dead from an earthquake in Pakistan and India. The failed response of FEMA to Hurricane Katrina. Local woman found dead under a picnic table in a park.
Elias scoots to the base of my chair saying: Mama, mama. I stop staring at the computer screen to scoop up my child. He smiles and grabs my nose. I kiss him and spin him around in the air.
How do I hold images of death, destruction and failed leadership alongside the sweet warm hug of my baby boy? How do I find balance between external chaos and inner comfort?
I look around my modest two bedroom home and feel like I own too much stuff though yesterday I thought I needed more. I live in the United States, a country that rolls in merchandise, in stuff made elsewhere, sewn by small hands only a few years older than my son's.
How do I live with this hypocrisy and still cherish my life for what it is? How do I stay in the moment, in the giggle of crinkled paper, the delight of Cheerios, the simple pleasure of being picked up, when I know that there is deep despair around the edges and my time of comfort rests on the heartache of others.
This is my daily challenge-- one that I don't see going away.
(Written last fall in my Living History writing class on the topic of daily challenges)
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Shortly after Hurricane Katrina a friend of mine emailed me two journalistic photos with their published captions beneath them. The first photo showed a white couple wading through water with bags of food above their head and the caption started: Couple finds...
The second picture showed a black woman wading through water with bags of food above her head and the caption started: Woman loots...
Would the government have rescued white people from their rooftops faster then they aided the poor black residents of New Orleans? Would the levees have been fixed ahead of time if the wealthier whiter parishes stood directly in harms way?
I wonder.
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There are times when the real can be worse than the imagined. And there are times when all my problems seem so trivial, so insignificant, so small.
I heard someone--how's that for name recollection-- say on NPR that if he took the entire population of the Bay Area and brought them to New Orleans to do clean up and recovery work, in ten years they would not be finished.
Perspective.
Perspective.
Perspective.