Ads are not an endorsement by the blog author.

Lotus Martinis

Public Journal
 Back to Journal Archives | Subscribe to Alerts Alerts Subscribe to Alerts | Feeds
< the fitness journ
Friday, September 23, 2005 fall >
Sunday, October 23, 2005
September 2005
9/26/05
carpe diem, baby
9/23/05
the fitness journal....
9/22/05
where the excitement never starts
9/21/05
plodding on
9/20/05
I just need a trapeze
9/19/05
all fear the fitness journal
9/17/05
cloudy
9/5/05
freeing the rant within
« September 2005 Archive
Monday, September 26, 2005
5:10:00 PM PDT

carpe diem, baby


 

     Picture from Hometown

            “Carpe Diem” ~ Busch

 

It seems we have all indeed been fated/cursed to “live in interesting times.”  We are, of course, far from unique.  As writer Niall Ferguson points out, in 1755 the Portuguese capital of Lisbon was flattened by an earthquake that killed thousands of its inhabitants.  To Voltaire, the Lisbon quake was a “cruel piece of natural philosophy!”  Writing in a letter to a friend, the French philosopher says:

 

“We shall find it difficult to discover how the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds --- where a hundred thousand ants, our neighbors, are crushed in a second on our ant heaps…dying undoubtedly in inexpressible agonies, beneath debris from which it was impossible to extricate them…What a game of chance human life is!”

 

During Katrina, elderly patients are abandoned to die in the floodwaters that just kept on coming.   One woman is in daily touch with a public official, begging for help, but he cannot come to her aid and breaks down on television before an audience of millions in anguish over her death.  During subsequent Hurricane Rita, a busload of nursing home patients actually does succeed in evacuating, only to wind up blowing up on the highway, while in Beaumont, a family of five pulls a generator indoors to keep it from being stolen and is found asphyxiated by the fumes the next morning.

 

The message is clear; damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  The fate of humans, it seems, is not just a game of disinterested, random chance, but more of a pointedly cruel game of Russian roulette.

 

My mother sometimes refers to me as “my Gigi,” as in “Is that my Gigi in the kitchen?”  It always tugs at my heart, though I can’t say why.  I think of those other mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers who died so tragically in the floods, and imagine them hearing hopeful noises in the dark as the gray waters kept rising and wondering, “Is that my William/Janice/Robert/Claire in the kitchen?  Has he/she come for me?”  Did they weep, I wonder, thinking that they would have moved heaven and earth to save these, their children ~ unable to comprehend that they in turn been left to die alone?  Did they forgive? 

 

And what of the agony of William/Janice/Robert/Claire?  They believed their parents to be safely moved to higher ground.  How do they live with the knowledge of how their loved ones died?  Do they imagine, like me, the terror and ultimate realization of that final abandonment?  Can they forgive those that left them?  Can they forgive themselves?

 

I think of my own frail mother, and can’t imagine but that I would have done anything in my power to save her, and that she would not have drawn her last breath until I had drawn mine.  And then I think how easy, and how crucial it is to believe that, but that the reality is that no one knows for certain exactly how, in those unexpected moments of terror and panic, they will react in life or death situations.  We have to believe in our better selves because we could not otherwise go on.  

 

These images and the questions they raise haunt my dreams still.  In the end, I wind up doing what I always do when I need to clear my head and find some balance ~ seeking out art and artists whose talent and vision inspire hope, wisdom and healing.  Images to soothe the troubled soul.  Serendipitously, I came across the New Orleans-based artist called Busch, who describes his work as:

 

…part meditation, balance and a means of communicating from my soul. Buddhism teaches that everyone of us has the innate wisdom, awareness, compassion, love and power of Buddha, however, it is only by looking inward, rather than seeing external fulfillment, that one begins to awaken or liberate the Buddha within…

 

Wisdom, awareness, compassion and love.  Carpe Diem.



Written by txsguinan Blog about this entry
This entry has 19 comments: (Add your own) Show all comments (14 more)