Reflections: A Storm Is Still Coming

Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day…

Sentinel squirrel, cloaked in brown, white chest bared, standing atop the highest loblolly pine branch. In the distant blue sky, the red shouldered hawk soars. Sighted or no? Life and death matters on Monday morning but to squirrel and hawk, one day lasts a moment.

Hurricane Dorian, the storm that creeps

Compassion is more emotionally challenging than loving-kindness because it involves the willingness to feel pain (Pema Chodron).

Kindness has a free feel to it, so full of possibilities as the opening act to compassion, the three acts of life, the show that never closes. Only its players change.

Binoculars focused, I scan the tops of the loblolly pines, live oaks and all that stand tall but no sentinels, not a single squirrel. Maybe they have gone to ground to gather all and anything for the coming storm, like the hoarding humans who flock to Publix, shopping carts overflowing with every kind of carb imaginable packaged in the colors of the rainbow. And peanut butter, industrial sized spread for the loaves among the salted chips.

Add in six packs of Vienna sausages or any kind of canned meat, sardines or smoked oysters, enough to last until the end times. Of course, there is wine and beer in cases but mostly there are empty shelves. Water has a value higher than all else, and ice holds the worth of Fort Knox before we left the gold standard.

There is no storm like uncertainty.

Slouching toward justice, because we must be dragged

 Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do (Wendell Berry).

May we feel justice sooner than later so the future is better than our past, not how we always lived but that we changed. Nature’s generosity is not boundless but we are not without our wits, either, as misplaced as they are.

This is the time of monsters of our own making, hurricanes that sit atop island paradises and fires that swallow rainforests. Nature is and always has been the majority in life and death matters. She, not father, knows best.

We must be sentinels, binoculars to hand, so we sight not only the hawk but the dove. It is easy to be fooled from afar.

Aim for Even posts offer equanimity a dose at a time. No day or dose is ever the same, even if the aim is. You may read about the origins of Aim for Even here or on this site’s About page.