I would have ruled this world too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Tsunamis Suck

brendalove@gmail.com


The death toll from the tsunami now stands at almost 60,000. I hardly know what to say anymore. Once a tragedy becomes so large it just goes beyond anything you can say. Silk is okay, Kit says his family okay but Enigma http://mymusingz.blogspot.com/ has not been heard from. She lives in Bangalore, India. Silk said there was no news on Bangalore but at an area just below there that was hit there are about 8,000 dead. I studied a map of India and Bangalore is way far enough inland that I think Enigma might be okay....but if she doesn't blog in soon it looks like another yellow ribbon will be posted on this site.


All of this has me thinking about life and death and the Unknown. When you're a kid you don't think anything will ever happen to you, you don't think about death at all. But once you get to be an adult and especially after having kids, you start to realize that hey, even I, the great ME, will die one day. You start becoming aware of just how tiny and insignificant your life really is. Compared with all the other lives out there, you are just another grain of sand on the beach, baby. And then when you think about all the hundreds of millions of lives that came before you....well, it can be a bit overwhelming to think about.


I'm opening myself up to some ridicule here but I do believe in reincarnation. I have read so much about it and it makes so much sense. The first argument people come up with when you say you believe in it is that if reincarnation is true, how can you account for there being so few people on the Earth back in the day compared with how many people are on the Earth now. Well, I don't think everyone is reincarnated. I'm sure new souls arrive on the scene all the time. As a matter of fact, I think the whole thing is probably more complicated that we could ever dream. Like maybe you can combine souls and reincarnate together as one. Or maybe a soul gets split. I firmly believe there are people with no souls at all.


And this little story has nothing to do with anything I've been talking about at all but I am compelled to tell it anyway. When I was at college in the Appalachian Mountains I went hiking up on the Parkway with a boyfriend. We had gotten a good distance into the wilderness when we came up on a cow pasture. There were cows there but no farm in sight. We found some rocks in the corner of the pasture and sat down to rest. We're just sitting there, chilling out, looking at the mountains and smelling cowshit when it suddenly occurs to me that hey, we're sitting on these big rocks in the middle of this pasture. These rocks are totally out of place looking. I jumped up and inspected my rock and there were etchings all over it, kind of like the picture above, but the rock was much, much bigger. I started looking at the other stones and they were all etched too. We had found an ancient graveyard! We tried our best to make out anything at all on those stones but we couldn't. The stones were very old, I would guess these graves were at least 1700's. We wondered if it was an Indian graveyard but there's no way to know. It was so cool though, I felt like we had discovered something no one had paid any attention to for many, many years and it felt like sacred ground.

Being the teenagers we were, we tripped out on it for awhile and then we left. I didn't bother noticing how we got there, how we got back, or where we were exactly on the Parkway, which is HUGE. But I think of that place often and wish I knew how to get back. Its possible no one has even been there since we were there. But I'll never forget.

Unless I get Alzheimer's. But that's a whole other blog entry on another day.