cannot comprehend

Too much devastation today. I can’t even process or comprehend the pictures coming in from New Orleans, Mississippi, Alabama--or the feeling that the poor just keep getting poorer. Where is the justice in this world? I know, godlovers say it comes in the next, which must be scant comfort to those who get none.

I was reading a blog this morning—yes, I came to it from a knitlink—that made me wonder again why there are some women whose role in life seems to be purely ornamental. As far as I could tell, this knitter’s job was to hold up her husband’s gorgeous and enormous house, to make sure she stayed thin enough, and to be-deck herself (lest you think I am all snotty, she was truly lovely in some of her fantastic knitted garments, and her enthusiasm for knitting was genuine and contagious).

Here’s my question: if you, in your cells, were fashioned to be ornamental, do you know that you are content or discontent with being ornamental? (if a tree falls in the forest. . .?) I squeeze my eyes closed hard to imagine myself being ornamental (a far stretch indeed!) and then have to remind myself that it’s impossible on the most basic level—I simply couldn’t be. I was designed far, far differently—not more, not less than, but with an altogether different network diagram. But it doesn’t keep me from being envious of those who are and who are content to be.

Here’s my own confession: I have been infected with the sickness of greed (I think I’ve directly plagiarized that from the Last of the Mohicans movie, but it resonates) the last couple of months. Yesterday morning, I woke with it in full force. It isn’t just greed for things, although that is definitely a part of it. It includes greed for time, health, experience, views, etc. Just overall dis-eased.

And then I began to see the pictures on the morning show (I’d been in training all day Monday and Tuesday and so only vaguely knew the hurricane was happening). Whole neighborhoods...well, you know. We’ve all been glued to CNN. It’s a combination of stunning shock, and then underneath, a thread: what would I be doing in those circumstances, with everything, everything stripped away? These people have jobs, homes filled with beloved and hard-acquired things, or none of the above. They have pets they love as much as I love Harvey, and some couldn’t save them. They had taps with running water and now there is terrible thirst. They have diseases that require medicine that needs to be refrigerated, carefully timed and administered. Like the old man who needed oxygen--having survived the flood, they will die anyway. They need every basic thing restored and supplied, and even though there will be (at least temporarily) an outpouring of every basic thing, it will require huge mobilizations to put them together with those things.

B was reading on his listerv last night about a man, safely out of harm’s way, who got his family out but his home and business are lost. This, a huge tragedy and heartbreak in any other circumstance, may be considered a best case scenario in the near future. All the same, it means that there is so much more heartbreak to come—so much that we will, as distant Americans do, become immune to it and forget very quickly. There are people who committed suicide rather than live their lives in the reality that is coming. And already the game of blame—some of it very rational given the crazymaking question of how in this day does it take so long?—begins.