| |
|
Gold finches, turning from winter drab to summer bright looked like they had just come out of an ill sorted laundry load. Perhaps they need this humbling experience in order to avoid too much pride in their brilliant golden appearance for the warm months. They would soon compete with the daffodils and forsythia for best spring yellow.
Then came that ‘nearly a record’ April snow. Have you ever noticed how adversity brings some families or communities together to face the common threat? There was a similar lack of squabbles at the feeders while all the birds found ways to simply survive the storm. Nesting and mate-seeking behaviors came to a screeching halt while all of the birds found shelter as near as possible to sources of food. This storm alone made me glad that I had persisted in filling the feeders all winter. Birds were literally standing in line waiting to help themselves to seed and suet.
And while the whole eastern half of the country was still in the midst of this very news-worthy storm story, another event riveted our attention for days. It was a raging storm of another kind that left mostly young promising victims in its wake. Many people have been directly or indirectly affected by the rampage at Virginia Tech. One group I keep wondering about are those who bullied this young man. I am not trying to justify his behavior in any way. I think he was a very disturbed person who did horrible things. But how do the people who pushed him around and belittled this tortured soul find peace? It is not that I think they should spend loads of time feeling guilty since guilt benefits no one. I do think though that perhaps we can find ways to better protect the vulnerable among our young people.
We have stripped teachers and school administrators of so much of the power and numbers they need to look after our children that they can do too little to protect children from each other. Children will always tease and humiliate each other. What the weaker ones need to know is that people care about that and do not condone or support it. They need to see that there is some modicum of justice in schools, if they are ever to expect it in the society at large. School is the community at large for all of our formative years; and it is a harsh community. Not many of us would willingly repeat the school experience. Perhaps the idea that you can judge a society based on how it treats its weakest members needs to be applied to life in our schools.
There is a way in which we convince ourselves that the horror at Virginia Tech is more real than the birds at our back yard feeders. There surely is a different human impact and a vast difference in scope of human interest. Yet it is all a part of the reality of any given moment that ‘large’ ‘important’ things happen at the same time as ‘small’ ‘trivial’ ones. Many kinds of divergent happenings occur at any given time. Babies are born while people are tortured somewhere else. Birds turn colors while polar bears go hungry. People starve while kids learn to kick a ball. Plants grow, bacteria thrive and vaccines are discovered while Alzheimer’s persists and new stars form. Quilts are made, ATMs programmed and wars are fought while concerts are rehearsed and diapers changed. This convergence of everything can be overwhelming or reassuring depending on ones perspective. When we look at the universal oneness of everything, the burning ‘why’ questions find little fertile ground. Back in the 60’s and 70’s there was button showing a tree in silhouette and the phrase ‘Everything is Connected’.
If everything is connected and all is one then why do anything but contemplate your navel? If good and evil are heads and tails of the same coin, does it matter which side is up? Selfless, benevolent, caring, generous, compassionate, loving, gentle :: or :: Selfish, malevolent, hateful, mean, intolerant, spiteful, vengeful. It would be pretty hard to argue that it does not matter on which side of that list one chooses to live. It is also obvious on which side of the list we would like our neighbors to live. Saying that there is a oneness of life does not mean that all experience of life is the same. And just because we are all made of star stuff doesn’t mean that we all get to stand around and just glow. We need to sing, work, play, struggle, wonder and whine. We need to be human and decide at any given moment on which side of that list we choose to live. Some one recently lied about one of my children and hurt them financially as well. Trying to stay on my preferred side of the list has been an especially difficult series of decisions lately. How does a parent maintain their center while handling a more grievous wrong like the death of a child? I hope I never get to know.
And while goldfinches continue to turn colors twice a year and spring bulbs do manage to survive the onslaught of late snow storms, we humans continue to try to make sense of our world in the best ways we know how. A significant part of that may well be keeping a perspective that allows us to keep abreast of the world at large while not forgetting to see what ‘insignificant’ things are happening in our own backyard. It seems that sometimes deliverance is in the details.
Be Well and stop to watch a flower open while you fight for justice or just go to work.
Cheryl Caister |
|
|
|
