seriously though

let's see, a
barking new ipad,
shiny,
and so thin that
I might dip it in
my tea.
if only the
Get A Life app,
would open.

yet more rumours of wars

It's true that we seem to have been having more than our fair share of calamitous events in recents months. There have been a number of awful earthquakes and one disastrous tsunami. There have been troubles around the globe, from wars in various modes (Libya, Afghanistan, The Congo etc) to major economic collapses (the GFC), global warming and so forth. I'm sure you can add to this modest list.

And so it's tempting to ponder whether matters are genuinely getting worse (more terrible events, closer together) or whether we are just perceiving them to be so. There will always be merchants of the apocolypse in our midst and they are at work now, reading this or that occurrence into some prophetic text. You know, it's not hard to shape any text into what you want, if the desire is there. If you are pre-motivated by things that you are actually seeking, then you may well find them.

I think that you'll find that we are having a pretty much average amount of everything awful (wars, natural disasters, recessions). I think that if you pick out any one year in the last two centuries, you will find average amounts of stuff or predictable fluctuations occurring. That doesn't discount the human cost - the loss of life and suffering is something for all of us to mourn over, but that we probably shouldn't get into a lather when disasters occur.

What is different is the way events are communicated and how they are reported. And that's a whole other blog for some other time.

the unimaginable

We live by the familiar. Things may change around us - our house may fall or burn, a road might be widened, shops might be torn down or rebuilt anew. But the general lay of things remains constant, and this constancy gives us the opportunity to build lives in which risk is possible.

Whenever I revisit my old family home in Vaucluse I notice the changes. An ugly apartment block where there used to be farms and bamboo. Huge shrubs masking our old house so that not a brick can be seen from the road. A cinema that is now a Coles. But the lay of things is familiar still - the bend in the road near our house, the magnificent view out through Rosy Gully, the old cemetery up the hill with its headless angels. Macquarie lighthouse.

So when I look at photos of towns in the tsunami zone in Japan, towns which have almost been erased from the landscape, then I wonder how people might return and pick up the pieces. Or how they can get on with life when everything that is familiar is gone. When everything is unfamiliar all of the time, and this is where and how you must live, then how do you proceed? How do you process the little daily transactions that encompass existence?

I don't know, but the poor people of towns like Ofunato and Natori are about to find out. We can spare a thought for their plight every time we take for granted what is constant in our own lives. And step into their shoes, if only for a moment.

turbid ebb-tide
amongst the shoes and splinters,
a solitary hina doll.

in sleepy Yuriage
it's two forty-six pm,
The End of the World.

tohoku 11.3.11.

The earthquake off Tohoku and the subsequent tsunami have been devastating. It's impossible to put into words the effect of the live TV images of destruction, which seemed almost to be scenes from a disaster movie. To see farms and villages swept away by walls of black, debris-choked water was heart-breaking enough. The shock was amplified when the cameras of the choppers zoomed in to reveal that the flotsam was not a collection of small uprooted objects, but whole cars, buses and ships, swept along like a child's toy at the beach. Burning refineries, engorged and lethal rivers bursting with bobbing cars and helpless fishing boats, crushed houses. Somewhere in all this chaos are people. Somewhere. The thought of their condition, the realization that crossed their minds at the enormity of what was suddenly happening to them, is incomprehensible.

Japan, as you know, was my second home and some of my happiest memories were made there. Some of the kindest, sweetest people I will ever meet live there. This is a place that lives in my heart and to which my thoughts routinely return. So it is with deep sadness that I write these words.

I pray for those who mourn, who are afraid, who simply don't know what's next. For those who are injured, confused, trapped, desolate.

God bless Japan.