Lovely, brutal

It's brutal out there.

Not just the cold, which is seasonably barbarous as well as inevitable, but also the climate. The air in which we surround ourselves is getting thinner and thinner.

I find it hard to catch my breath.

But you don't need me to tell you that things don't seem to be going well. The news torrent has made sure you understand.

As we welcomed a new year, four souls were savagely murdered in our city, two of them children. A young man in a unicorn hat laughed at a suicide victim and posted it on YouTube while hundreds of thousands of minions pressed a “like” button. And the old man at our helm rattled a nuclear saber as if it were a school-yard taunt.

Each day brings a new opportunity to let our jaws hang wide open.

There's no reason for any of it. Maybe there's just no reason.

To live in this age feels like jousting with Don Quixote. Only in our time, it seems as if the windmills at which we tilt have become truly dangerous.

Every misstep a potential disaster.

As we move from one tragedy to another, we think our skins toughen up or we just become numb. Or maybe it is the same as it ever was: precarious at best.

We live our lives as watershed moments.

Every change seems like a place in a river where water collects for a time before it drains off. Often in a new direction. Sometimes, but not always, with calamitous results.

We live, we die. In between we experience everything … anew. We can't learn history because we haven't experienced it.

We are not unchanged by the current or past events, perhaps, but we must move along. We may keep our heads down, holding our breath. Or we may find exhilaration in the tide and splash along happily.

My mother used to say there is nothing new under this sun. Even its shadows have existed throughout time immemorial.

I miss my mother.

She left this world last year around this time and went back to the earth. She is with her mother now.

But I know I'd miss her more if a part of her didn't live on in me … and in my daughter and son. Reminders of her are in the strangest of places. A song, playing on the radio. A kettle, boiling on the stove. A pencil scratching paper.

Even a look on my boy's face can bring her back: A curled lip that opens into a laugh.

Her laugh. Her smile. Her dark sense of humor filling the air with spice. Its particles floating around with the dust motes, as they glint in the sun and seem to stop time for an instant. Like a hologram.

Memories visit this way. Flashes only I can see that appear suddenly and unexpectedly.

It's not an altogether unpleasant feeling. It's warm and familiar, like finding glimpses of home as you pass through the unfamiliar.

The flashes leave as quietly as they came. An internal hug against the ordinary or mundane.

It's like sound after it snows. Everything blanketed in cold and silence.

It's not brutal out there if you can just listen to the snow and be still. It's beautiful.