A line cast, a hope followedSunday, September 05, 2004
On Friday my kids and I spent the day sleeping late, having a home cooked breakfast, going to a high desert museum/zoo, swimming, going to an art gallery walk, having dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and falling into bed at 10:30PM exhausted.
On Friday over a hundred children were lost in an incredibly tragic fashion in Russia.
How am I supposed to feel? Siona was right, in my comment below, futility isn't the right word for it. Although for the rest of the day after reading that headline, I felt like the world was ending and that anything I was doing in my life was futile if it didn't make a concrete difference to decrease the chaos of hatred induced violence. And yet, this is what I do in my job, in a small way, what I do when I talk to kids in schools about hatred, in what I try and teach my own children about respect for the earth and listening to others. But it seems so tiny. And this week, we are just playing, having fun, enjoying a vacation for the last week before school starts.
So there is this ridiculous contrast. We frolic in this vacation town where the main worry for the day for the people around us is whether to get the caramel corn or the waffle cone at the corner sweet shop, and I can't pretend I don't think of places where there is no food. I pull my kids close on the couch as we watch Spongebob and think how lucky I am to sit on a couch and watch Spongebob with my two healthy happy kids, and start to ache that others have lost their kids so senselessly. And its all so heavy and my kids know something is wrong. The existence of suffering, and the existence of joy are the duality of living. I don't quite seem able to shut one out so the other can be unburdened.
On Friday over a hundred children were lost in an incredibly tragic fashion in Russia.
How am I supposed to feel? Siona was right, in my comment below, futility isn't the right word for it. Although for the rest of the day after reading that headline, I felt like the world was ending and that anything I was doing in my life was futile if it didn't make a concrete difference to decrease the chaos of hatred induced violence. And yet, this is what I do in my job, in a small way, what I do when I talk to kids in schools about hatred, in what I try and teach my own children about respect for the earth and listening to others. But it seems so tiny. And this week, we are just playing, having fun, enjoying a vacation for the last week before school starts.
So there is this ridiculous contrast. We frolic in this vacation town where the main worry for the day for the people around us is whether to get the caramel corn or the waffle cone at the corner sweet shop, and I can't pretend I don't think of places where there is no food. I pull my kids close on the couch as we watch Spongebob and think how lucky I am to sit on a couch and watch Spongebob with my two healthy happy kids, and start to ache that others have lost their kids so senselessly. And its all so heavy and my kids know something is wrong. The existence of suffering, and the existence of joy are the duality of living. I don't quite seem able to shut one out so the other can be unburdened.
