Home Ground

So many thoughts as we drove home, memories of before and after, muscles tired from the long journey eager for familiar ground. Always thoughts of gladness and sorrow combined. ... for what lays beyond the bend of the land.

As we entered home ground we were silent, each with our own perceptions of the land, 

the weather, thoughts of our people.

The news trickled in about Boston.. a heaviness entered my chest.. I felt compressed, small, drained.

As we unpacked and looked around, knowing our fine feathered friends would be gone, vacated, absent.. (for we had left and food was no where to be found). we noticed a great tragedy on the large picture window. A mysterious sadness smeared the glass before us. Tracks and trails of blood and remains, body secretions and other such stuff were everywhere. A mighty battle had taken place on the window and on the chair below the window. There was too much evidence to be one of our small feathered friends. It was more probable that a large raptor had taken prey in this very spot. 

Life had been taken, life... death, birth... death

It is never ending today and everyday. 

Joseph Campbell's writing came to mind as I sat to pen. 

"The obvious lesson of all which is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think- and their name is legion- that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think- as do many- Let me first correct society, then get around to myself." are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God's peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is."