Laura G Owens ~ Writer. Raw. Real. Chronically Ambivalent.

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do, you apologize for the truth. – Benjamin Disrael

Month: September 2012

Making our mundane tasks, not

I recall years back Oprah had a woman on her show who talked about the Zen of honoring day-to-day to-dos, that we can decide to appreciate the mundane and become consciously aware of ourselves in the moment of doing even the most “trivial” tasks.

She gave an example of doing laundry and trying to find the happy place with that. Well okay yes, even folding socks and undies can bring some to a calming place — I imagine.

Maybe not so much for me so my husband does his own laundry. This often stuns people, like laundry is reserved girl work. I’m pretty sure it’s not, exclusivity on girl work remains with baby making and breastfeeding. That’s about it. Men know how to sort. And if they don’t, the first time they mix and match and end up with pink drawers they learn the art of separation pretty fast. I also taught my teen girl how to do laundry. It’s novel now, eventually she might hate it. Either way, it’s hers.  Read more…

September 11th Survivor Tree: The Meaning of Life

Photo credit: Janey Henning

9/11 Memorial, Tree of Life, September 11thWatch: September 11th Survivor Tree Story. (1 minute 53 seconds)

This summer my family and I visited the September 11th Memorial. It was quiet, stirring, reverent and beautiful, surprisingly not laden with overwhelming sadness. It was instead, tinged with it.  The place felt for me, like stages of death acceptance when disbelief, anger and grief move from the how-can-we-go-on wrenching place, to a glimpse of peace.

I’m of course, injecting my own feeling into the footprint memorial of a once mountainous horror.

We inject our own meaning into what we want to feel.

 

This year I choose to avoid the burning images and the reading of the deceased. I’ve seen. I’ve heard. Hundreds of hours. We all did. I still gasp in my mind at the images in Life of bodies jumping out. That image, perhaps more than any, is seared.

To choose death over burning alive is a “choice” beyond understanding, and so our mind will not rest.

Humans are programmed to understand, to survive.

I hold echos of that day, smudges of ash remain, but now I want the ashes to blow away. I honor and respect the memory of our lost Americans and their surviving families, but re-visiting the horror, at least today, no longer serves me — and so I say good-bye.

September 11th Survivor Tree Story. 

In this moving video the Memorial guide escorting widow Alice Martin lovingly refers to the Survivor tree as “her.”

“She’s” a natural living treasure who sprouted new limbs from her injured tree elbows. Survivor produces lovely white flowers every April, a celebration of flourishing, despite. The Memorial team, the guide explains, may propagate saplings. I think that would be fitting.

Baby trees born from their Survivor mom, saplings with no memory or history of September 11th, their roots untouched by the Unimaginable.

Tree of Life. Tree of Perseverance. She is a Survivor.

P.s. I appreciate that I happened to watch the video just after I happen to read the definition of “existentialism” on Wikipedia, which I think I get, and I think I identity with.

It’s been a while since I read The Metamorphosis in English class. The notion of transformation via waking up a roach is an image I want to avoid.  A butterfly, a loved dog, fine. I can’t even look at our Florida-famous Palmetto bug (aka big roach) without literally screaming “eek” and going into a fetal ball.

I wonder, do philosophical ideas like existentialism come pre-loaded with head-scratching reactions? I think therefore, I am confused.

I appreciate as well that I saw the Survivor Tree video after I hit the Wiki link about “nihilism,” a concept regularly confused with existentialism. Apparently Nietzsche wrote of both philosophies so the two ideas were erroneously placed together.

I reject Nihilism. “Life has no intrinsic meaning or value.” Blek on that. Life has meaning alright, even if I’m the one placing the meaning.

Survivor Tree knows life has meaning. She breathed long and gasping under burning rubble just so she could come back to tell us.

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén

Site last updated August 28, 2023 @ 2:06 pm

%d bloggers like this: