My Thoughts Are Spinning...

"Over here, the rains fail; they are starving. There, the caribou fail; they are starving. Corrupt leaders take the wealth. Not only there but here. Rust and smut spoil the rye. When pigs and cattle starve or freeze, people die soon after. Disease empties a sector, a billion sectors.

People look at the sky and at the other animals. They make beautiful objects, beautiful sounds, beautiful motions of their bodies beating drums in lines. They pray; they toss people in peat bogs; they help the sick and injured; they pierce their lips, their noses, ears; they make the same mistakes despite religion, written language, philosophy, and science; they build, they kill, they preserve, they count and figure, they boil the pot, they keep the embers alive; they tell their stories and gird themselves...

Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?"

Excerpt from: THIS IS THE LIFE

By Annie Dillard from the Fall issue of Image

Dillard's most recent book is For the Time Being.

Then what? Annie poses a question that I find I wrestle with constantly. I live in a culture that finances religious scholars to help me think about God "correctly" or at all. I live in a culture that rules out objections with reason rather than simply extending love. I was exposed to a culture that struggled for freedom, food, health, shelter, limbs, the opportunity to be heard, to be seen. I was young. I have lived in this culture of American-Christiendom for a long time now. I have sought to understand the culture in which I was born, yet I continue to return to a different land where the sounds and soil hold close to the people and you always look each other in the eyes. You are human. I want dignity for all people. I know it is within the creator where love for all creation is found. Whenever I have a human exchange, I choose to leave dignity intact for us both. Shoes on or off.