Friday, August 24, 2012

thinking out loud

i didn't get very far.
blogged and then read one email.
and i'm back.

there's stuff goin' on that breaks my heart.
i don't even like to talk about it cause it just truly breaks my heart.

a little girl got sent away from a loving family to go live with a dad
she never knew in an entirely different country.

yeah.

i witnessed something similar a few months before my dad died.
it threw me into a hole and then when my dad died, between everything,
i entered a few years of bleakness. it took me a long time to find
my footing again.

so this friend wrote and we talked of the little girl.

and i realized something that's a big part of the story that disturbs me.

we can't change it.

we watch things happen and we can't change them.

and we are so much more powerless than we realize.

i know.
i know.

we are much more powerful than we know as well.

i do know that.
and i do believe that.

but this round, the lack of control is in my face.

i am (still) reading the book 'the first circle' - it's a classic russian novel
about the best 'camps' you could be sent away to when stalin was in power.

what has stood out for me so much thru reading this is how people were just
picked up, arrested, and then trapped (and much more).

truly, part of my head goes 'how can this be???'

how can we just not have control over what happens to us???

how can this be???

and i marvel at how that's such a puzzle to me.
that's as puzzling to me as not having the control.
how can i not really understand this is how life goes sometimes?
and how can it be so foreign to my head?
and yet it is.

i think the complete inability to change something awful - and the
realizing of that - feels as horrible as the awful thing happening.

and yet i want to really live, right? i talk of that in the post below.
of how life isn't all good and how you have to dive into the all.

how do you dive into this? how do you accept this and keep going?
how do you dive into the concentration camps? how do you dive into
all the bad stuff in the world???

the only thing i have to hang on to this morning is the 'mystery' stuff that
is also on my mind. of how there is always light in the darkness......it's
there in some form.

and maybe to keep on going i have to look for that.
i really don't know.

and maybe using this stuff to fuel what i do, and who i am and what i offer....
maybe that needs to happen as well.

2 comments:

Sherry said...

Terri, I can be the queen of denial at times because of this. I think it's not necessarily a bad thing to not be able to understand because they are things that should not be acceptable, and if more people couldn't fathom them, there would be less instances of it.
But. Since stuff like this still happens...I heard a bit on NPR the other day...I had meant to go look up more about it since I only caught a part..but I forgot. but you reminded me!! So this guy...the one part I remember that clicked with me is that during the interview he said something about how even in the worst situations...our sense of community is what brings us joy. He referenced concentration camps. He also spoke of living in the moment. Told about this one woman who when they heard that a bunch of them were to be shot the next day still sat down with her son and made him do his lessons. With the idea of, "I don't know what's happening tomorrow, but today you have to do your lessons." Anyway, here's the link to an article of his: http://www.onbeing.org/program/fragility-and-evolution-our-humanity/feature/ecce-homo-behold-humanity/1561
I have to read it all still.
But here's the podcast link: http://www.onbeing.org/program/fragility-and-evolution-our-humanity/101/audio?embed=1 I still have to listen to it too...anyway...hope it helps!

terri st. cloud said...

sherry! thank you! will totally check this out!!! so glad you're out there,girl....