All our splendid monuments, Mark Morford
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what the storm’s all about.” – Haruki Murakami
Let’s just say it outright – there is no better reminder – not death, not illness, not orgasm, not birth or marriage or divorce, not surgery or getting fired or going slightly mad on a cocktail of laudanum and cocaine and savage karmic dread – there is no better reminder that we know nothing, own nothing, and are powerless to do anything about it anyway, than the weather.
Have you noticed? Have you noticed enough? Storms, hurricanes, grand natural disasters of any serious scale have the most remarkable, devastating ability, not merely to slam us into compliance, not merely to remind us to buy better rain boots next time, not merely prove to us just how motherf—king awesome/terrifying is Mother Nature as a force of upheaval and annihilation, but to wipe our whiny, personal melodramatic slates clean.
Is it not the greatest thing? Is it not so harrowing and timeless as to be downright irrefutable? We look at something like Hurricane Sandy and we say, “Finally, it’s not all about us. Finally, something that has nothing to do with our petty woes, egos, logos, moans, arguments, scams, speeches, anonymous comments and porn addictions.”
All karmic doors are blown wide open. All emotional baggage revealed as rickety and thin. Sandy does not care about who you love, hate, or marry. She does not care who you vote for. She does not give a damn about your rent, your car, your opinion of gay marriage, Mitt Romney’s hollow soul, factory worker abuse in China, immigration reform, gas prices, Libya, or the well-being of your cat, you home or your children.
The rest: http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2012/10/30/splendid-monuments/
