blowin' in the wind

there was a story on the news last night about folks whose houses were hit by the recent local tornados. we get used to seeing the devastation in aerial shots -- houses turned to piles of strewn sticks. we get used to the seeing the devastation on the faces of the people -- tearfully proclaiming joy that although the house is gone, the life is intact.

and, yes, the life is intact -- the people are standing there living & breathing. and, that is life. but, what of the lives? what of the details of the everyday that are the makings of our lives? these details reside in our filing cabinets, our boxes of cancelled checks, our photograph albums, our jewelry boxes, our shoe boxes of old letters & our shoe boxes of shoes, our dvds & vhs tapes of family picnics & ballet recitals, our closets filled with clothing & blankets & towels, our drawers of socks & drawers of junk.

imagine having the details of your living scattered & blown, sifted & thrown -- for inches, feet, acres, miles.... this story on the news last night showed some folks who found bills & cancelled checks & photos from destroyed homes a couple hundred miles away.

i was looking thru the junk drawer in the kitchen this morning, looking for a paperclip, and had a moment of sheer panic in imagining my drawer of precious junk spread over my own backyard. imagine all the pieces & parts of your life, emptied from their rightful places, and put in your backyard. now, imagine these pieces in your neighbors' yards... and, their neighbors'... and theirs... off into the distance of miles & hundreds of miles. now, imagine these pieces getting rained on, stepped on, hung in a tree, nabbed by a squirrel, stuck to a passing car....

it make me a little woozy, just thinking about it. made me want to somehow have less of the pieces, and more of the life itself.