We’ve been lying to ourselves for thousands of years. So much damage, hideous and very real, inflicted by our thoughts. Thinking has its uses, as in: do this, and you’re in trouble, or do that, and brighten a life. But the other effects are far more deadly, a background buzz saw of separation and dismemberment. And yet we live like this almost every minute of every day…
UPDATE: This post was about focusing on the breath as a centering exercise. Well, so much for that, or rather, now I really need it. A long time ago, my family lived in Blacksburg, VA while my father taught ROTC at Virginia Tech. I don’t want to say anything else while the tragedy there this morning is still unfolding.
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Horrible, horrible guns and sick people. But I have good memories, anyhow.
Unbelievable events…positively defies any sense of humanity. I can only find some shred of solace in the astronomy picture of the day… the enigma of humanity remains staggering.
My deepest love especially goes out to those touched by this tragedy.
The one thing we can predict with certainty is that it will all be inexplicable and sad beyond belief. I wonder, John, if you were on the campus of the University of Texas that summer day in 1966 when Whitman went on his rampage? I was in Chicago that summer – the same summer, incidentally, that Speck raped and killed all those Philippino nurses in a townhouse in a Chicago suburb. In Austin one of my old friends from Abilene lay on the ground as the shots from the Tower whistled over his head. He could easily have been as dead as the others – a life extinguished in an instant of spectacularly bad luck before it could ever really begin. There is really no way to talk about these things except in the language of pure evil. Whitman and Speck were monsters in human guise. That conclusion is as inescapable as it is banal.
Thanks John for this post. I remember stopping about 25 years ago driving up to DC with my wife and kids for a short spring vacation. We visited the Capital Building, the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial and of course, the grave of JFK at Arlington Cemetery. We drove a different route home through the mountains of western Virginia and Tennessee. For some strange reason we were propelled to visit the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg where the beauty and tranquility brought us a sense of welcome relief.
This time of year is always unsettling to me. I lost each of my parents in the month of April during the 1950′s. Then in the 1990′s there was there was the Oklahoma City bombing, the Waco fire lit by government agents and then the Columbine High School massacre….and also the nonsense about a President and a few blow jobs.
I wonder sometimes where we are all headed with this demented SOB of a president and his war and with the economy ready to tank .Each week I drive by hundreds of those phony McMansions priced from 400K to 600K each and sitting unsold for 6 to 15 months. One in particular has a reduced pricetag of $375 thousand. In front is a 16 foot berm holding a storm drainage retention pond. Immediately behind the place is a polluted creek, a rail line and an eight lane freeway. But it will probably sell; as they say for every chair there’s an ass to sit in it..
But all is not vanity nor imemory or is it melancholia. I have my health so I can walk the woods nearby, putter around the house and almost do as I damn well please. I marvel at the beauty of nature. I watched today the high winds whipping the leaves and limbs of a giant oak behind the house. And on this bright clear evening I could see Venus high in the sky long before the stars began to appear.
I am grateful everyday for Farfeed and FOTOFEED and iTunes.. So enough already of my stream of thought. Selah. Byron
John, this is the equivalent of just another day in Iraq but with much more coverage from the press.
Bob: Oh, I know! It wasn’t long ago that a suicide bomber killed 70 or 80 students, mostly co-eds, in a cafeteria line or some such at Baghdad University. A half-day story here, at most. I thought at the time it would surely get to people, college students, educated, decent young people, blown to smithereens for being normal. Not a peep, though.
Byron: I wonder if you commented on the full post, before I cut it off short. Anyway, I hear you about April. I think you’re right. Weatherwise and emotionally, an often turbulent time. I appreciate your observations, too. I don’t know where we’re headed either, but keeping the connection to nature is vital. I couldn’t live without it. And thank you for your generous words.
K.J., regarding the Texas Tower sniper shootings, I was right there through the whole thing. Saw people gunned down, watched Whitman’s body being carried from the building covered by a sheet completely soaked and dripping with blood. I wrote about that day once on an older blog. Maybe I can dig it out.