To avert my gaze was to fall back into something from which I had been rescued, a hole filled with nothing, and that was the word for everything about me, nothing.
Jamaica Kincaid, "On Seeing England For the First Time"
The tulip trees can't help themselves this morning, brimming with buds. It is beautiful-- the fresh neon green of spring, the ground smothered by lavender lyre-leaf sage.
Somewhere in Syria, families are desperately seeking a way to salvage and save lives. The US President issues symbolic bombs in response to a chemical gas attack. One bomb begets another and families continue to suffer. We are willing to drop bombs but not to open our borders. Eager to display vengeance and project power without showing the kindness of an neighbor.
Bombs have never been enough.
Max's tulip by the Funky Little Free Library.
Max crows with pride over the tulip he planted two years ago-- "Look Mom, it's finally bloomed! Two years and finally, a flower." If only we were willing to grant as much as Syrian families. A tiny plot of soil in which to grow and thrive. Not the destruction of their homeland but the opening of ours.
Despite our religions and morals, we humans remain the world's most territorial mammals. Our commercialized selfishness stares back from billboards, reassures us that "our way of life" is deserved, a birthright.
What have we done to deserve the safety we steal from others?
The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart-- idea of thing, reality of thing-- the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness.
Jamaica Kincaid, "On Seeing England For the First Time"
What are we refusing to see when we lament the images of dead Syrian children?
What darkness do we invite between ourselves and our fellow human beings?
When you sigh with relief that Assad got bombed, how do you describe this emotion to your children? How do you celebrate a bomb? How do you justify the fence we maintain against refugees?
What blooms in this hardened soil of the American heart?
