Today I planted beets. While I was on my knees measuring out the grid, pushing the soil gently over the seeds, watching the tiny, brilliantly red bugs I've never seen before, I was thinking about how strange it is. It's very strange that I kneel on the dirt in the sunshine with gnarled seeds in my hands, planting for the future, because at the same time, there are people screaming for their lost children, and homes being lost to fire, and bodies suffering torment. But I was just kneeling and planting in peace.
Friends of ours lost everything except their house in the recent fires. They'd lived there almost forty years, built it up from nothing, built their home, and a greenhouse business, planted gorgeous trees... while I was planting beets, they were trying to identify their possessions that were stored in the garage from twisted, melted remnants. Trying to recover pictures of their daughter killed in a car accident twenty years ago. Trying to do all this with bodies torn in the haste of trying to keep the flames from taking everything.
They thought they'd be planting beets. And if they'd been planting, there would have been other people, other places, that were struggling just to survive that self-same moment. Maybe me.
It's so strange that I can hardly think about it. Somehow it doesn't make sense, that while I sleep, others suffer, and when I suffer, others sleep. There are times when we all seem to be so devastatingly connected that it seems impossible that what I experience, you can remain unaware of. But that's really the way it is.
And tonight I can't comprehend it at all.
