20 July 2005

For the love of Jebus, please remember the lesson!

I love this quote from Mark Morford. He is SO ON!

This is a quote from one of his first post-Indian Ocean tsunami articles. This really puts it all in perspective. We really all are alone, vulnerable, small, insignificant. What does it all mean? What are we supposed to take and learn from this thing called life?

"Maybe you see such horrors, as I tend to do, as a call to carpe diem, to cherish the day and enjoy the moment like never before and maybe make a change in your life and your perspective before it's too late and because you have nothing, really, to lose, and because life is frighteningly fleeting and it can all be literally washed away in the time it takes to walk your dog to the park and back.
Primordial. Primeval. Prelapsarian. Many other polysyllabic words come to mind to describe the tragedy that only seems to point up the fact that we know far less than we think we know about How It All Works and even less about Why the Hell We Have to Be Here to Witness It.
And what's worse, there's not a damn thing we can really do about it all, except get slapped, again, with the fact that life can be unspeakably violent and brutish right alongside stunning and beautiful, and there is not a single place on the planet that is absolutely free of potential catastrophe or epic disaster or slow and painful rebirth. Nowhere.
And therefore, no matter how many luxury resorts and how much money and how many McMansions and how many manly SUVs we gather desperately to ourselves like hollow and ultimately useless security blankets, this very fact, this slippery transitory insanity, is in our blood, our cells, our genetic code.
And in the end, we realize terror has nothing to do with angry Islamic fundamentalists or right-wing Christian warmongers, and everything to do with surviving this mad shocking circus so as to milk this experience for all it's worth and haul its cartload of shimmering and bloody and fragile lessons to the next level, the next life, the next Mystery.
Could the lesson -- if there is one -- be that simple? And that incredibly difficult?"

1 comment:

mrs the experience said...

"shimmering and bloody and fragile lessons" - nice turn of phrase.