It's just after two in the morning. I tried to put myself to sleep with a sentimental favorite Amazon Prime playlist, with some 20 plus songs each of which evokes some moment in time of my life. Didn't work.
I suppose it is true of anyone who has lived that he or she might say, "I've seen a lot in my time on the earth". I mean, after all, isn't that a bit of the sense you get when you hear Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
If I remember that song, well, I have lived through pretty much all of what is in it. I was a young child when Sputnik prodded America to make the moon its goal. I was just about as young when we were doing nuclear war drills by burying our heads under our hands under skeletal desks and wooden lockers precariously affixed to walls. I was several years a pre-teen when John Kennedy was assassinated, then his murderer, Lee Harvey Oswald. I was still a pre-teen when New York had its 1965 blackout. I was just a teenager when Martin Luther King was assassinated, and Bobby Kennedy followed. All through the sixties was the fall out of the Vietnam War, and the opened window that threw the baby out with the Catholic faith the tenets of which once true, became ever so . . .flexible.
On and on it has gone through the decades, Watergate, the destruction of the World Trade Center, Iraq, Afghanistan, the recent four years of bitter partisanship, sex, emolument clause, 25th Amendment, Mueller, Impeachment. . . .
And now, this, whatever it is that has made this and every other city look like one or more episodes of the Twilight Zone. As I lay in bed I noticed something you don't get in a big city, certainly not a block off the Sunset Strip on a Saturday--dead silence. I usually get a little bit of headlights visible as a car passes even through my shades. But tonight in my tossing and turning, I notice none. That sound of silence you might only hear in a country bed and breakfast, there it is, here in Weho, California.
Extraordinary. It would be wonderful if it were not all so. . . .creepy.
I slipped on a sweatshirt because it is in the fifties tonight, and stepped just outside my condo apartment building door. I was there for something like ten minutes. Not a car came down my block. Only two people, young, moving pretty quickly as if they wanted to get home fast. "It's too quiet" I imagined them saying to one another. Some rustling in the palm trees from a slight breeze. And yes, the odd fire engine or police car siren. As I write, having come back inside, I hear another siren breaking the otherwise dead silence.
It isn't the meditative kind of silence, alas. One tries to treat it that way, in my case, with reading, and prayer. Or break it with a few episodes of Inspector Morse. Something about the Oxford scenery is comforting, particularly if you had the pleasure of having visited there once.
My cats don't notice anything. Good for them. There is something to be said for limits to sentience.
Not sure if this is what war on one's own soil feels like--but whatever it is and whoever is causing it--for I do not believe that this is merely the result of 27,000 cases of a virus and 348 deaths (US) as troubling as is the omnipresence of death by an endless number of means and at astounding rates. (My internet stats say 151,600 deaths a day world wide, 6,316 an hour, 105 a minute, 2 a second).
Laugh though you might at my saying it, there is something darker here, and it is humanly caused by people we may know in power, and those we do not know. And since Transcendent principles are either not agreed upon or dismissed, there is nothing to keep the worst from happening.
Religious people refer to a chastisement. I guess I am one of those religious people, but I can tell you I'd rather not be in the middle of a chastisement as it seems I might well be. I very much want to meet God (hoping that he has not too much critique--good luck to me) but not as He comes upon a fiery cloud that breaks a silence like this one.
Ok, it's nearly three in the morning. I am waxing dramatic.
I am going to try to sleep, which probably means I won't sleep until I just wear myself out with thoughts of past, present, and the questionable future.
I have managed to stay away from reviewing Facebook for Lent--which methinks is pretty good considering I am looking for distractions from anxious thoughts--but I have posted these entries as I will post this one.
Lent doesn't seem like it's going to end in any kind of Easter celebration this year, at least in a Church. That's pretty disheartening. On the other hand, the actual Resurrection already took place 2000 plus years ago and He provides the Light of Hope, if only I don't allow myself to be blinded by yet another crisis in human history to which we are witness.
No comments:
Post a Comment