June 12-13: Pressure Cooker, Putting Out Fires, Poem from "Kyrie"

Sometimes people are determined to do things that will harm them, and nothing will change the course of their actions or lives.  Mental illness does this.  So does addiction.  I can attest to that fact.

It seems as though this pandemic has become a pressure cooker for a lot of the things that are wrong in the world.  Everything seems to be boiling over.  Racism.  Xenophobia.  Homophobia.  On home fronts, unstable families become more unstable.  There's the impulse to look away until all the fires go out.  That doesn't really solve anything.  It's simply an act of willful ignorance, ignoring a problem until it goes back into hiding or is a pile of ashes.

But problems don't disappear.  (Warning:  I'm about to mix metaphors here.)  Problems fester, and every once in a while they break open and all the sickness pours out.  That's what's happened with George Floyd and all the unrest that has followed his murder.  On a personal level, I've been dealing with some difficulties this past year or so that seem unending.  Just when I think the fire is under control, it flares up again.  (Sort of like the pandemic.  Everyone seems to be acting like it's disappeared.  It hasn't.  Second wave, on it's way.  Keep your masks handy, folks.)

I've had two people this evening who've been helping me stamp out a particular conflagration.  One of these people is a devout Christian.  The other is an atheist.  The atheist said this to me:  "As an atheist, I gotta say that deeply knowing how alone one is in the universe is a strong motivation for change."  The Christian told me this:  " . . . you believe in a Creator that is bigger than anxiety and depression and addiction.  He is bigger than all of us.  He is merciful and mighty and loves you . . . I pray that you think on those words as you lay trying to quiet your mind.  And know that your God loves you."

I find both of those statements strangely comforting, coming at the universe from two completely opposite points of view.  I am alone.  God is with me.  I am in charge of my own destiny.  God has a plan for me.  Don't be afraid of change.  God has your back.  In the end, both of these people were telling me the same thing:  fear not.

I went for a long walk this evening.  It was typical mid-June weather for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Warm.  Sunny.  Bugs eating me alive.  Yet, I still was able to appreciate the blue heavens.  Blue forget-me-nots growing along the path.  And blue-tailed damselflies buzzing in the lilac bushes. 

For those blue miracles, Saint Marty gives thanks tonight.

. . . and a poem about second waves:

poem from Kyrie

by:  Ellen Bryant Voigt

Home a week, he woke thinking
he was back in France, under fire;
then thought the house on fire, the noise and light,
but that was from the fireworks and the torches
and on the square, a bonfire--everyone,
in nightclothes, emptied from their houses,
drawn toward a false dawn as from a cave--

oh there was dancing in the streets all right,
and singing--"Over There," "Yankee Doodle,"
"Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory," I recall,
and "Camptown Races," who knows why--he plunged
into the crowd, tossed his crutch to the flames,
kissed delirious strangers on each side.

Say he lived through one war but not the other.