I don’t know half of what I need to know in this world. Not half, not a quarter, not an eighth, not a 1/quintillian.
It’s a puzzlement. Tragedy doesn’t necessarily bring wisdom. Sometimes it brings only dullness, apathy, anomie.
We love to read books where the heroine/hero overcomes all odds. Oprah and many others have made their livings off those rich droppings.
Nobody wants to read a story or hear a story about those travelers who didn’t make it; the boat people who drowned, the folks who died and whose bones are lost in the vastness of our southern deserts. All are walking to be saved and many more will be lost then saved.
Their families will remember them for a time. Their friends.
Their stories need to be told but they are not uplifting. These stories are sobering. They are a contrapuntal note to the triumph over adversity theme.
I am following a story on National Geographic. It’s called “Out of Eden Walk.” This man is walking from the oldest human fossil site in Ehiopia to Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. It’s really interesting and you can follow him online. He started in 2013 and it will take him seven years. Oh, and he is walking just like our ancestors did.
Why am I mentioning this to you? Well, because it takes me out of the pain of the present day.
We are a wandering species. Not just because of climate change, wars, and search for something better/different. We are walkers and sailors and fliers. We are goers. We are running to or running from.
As Paul Salopek walks across the scalding desert of Ethiopia, through hostile territory under the control of crazy rebels fighting for their piece of the action, he runs into surprising generosity and warmth from people who have nothing but share it. He and his team: two camels and two guides, encounter burial sites of folks who couldn’t make the whole journey. Rock mounds and circles inscribe the place of their death. The desert is a graveyard as well as a road out. I suppose death is a road out as well.
I cannot rationalize death from natural causes( famine, age, disease, misadventure) or man-made means. Religion, philosophy, history are poor solace for the destruction of so many. It makes me angry and want to get up on my high horse, but what will that accomplish. I was angry when my sister was killed in a car accident, and I am angry when people seeking a better life get lost in the deserts south of our borders and die. I am angry on a personal level and on a global level. Human life is cruel. If you don’t win the lottery, you don’t get to live. If you’re unlucky, oh well. Ofttimes, the virtuous, the good, the valuable, lose.
If you go way out on the fucking rim of the known universe and look back at these lost souls, you can see them as more of the same since Australopithecus picked his weary bones up off some desert floor somewhere and went looking for his salvation.
But, then, of course, you need to see yourself in historical terms, don’t you? You have to say, well, I made it this far, maybe my ancestors will make it farther.
Who says that except someone with nothing else to lose? They are the disappeared. They are the detritus of a global movement of souls. I know there is nothing new about what I write this morning. Seems like I woke up with an ache. It is an ache that should not ever go away. It is an ache for all our ancestors and us and those that will come after.
God rest those souls. God rest and keep them.
Hello. Yes, this is Dog 