Neither the undeservedly rich nor the undeservedly impoverished nor anyone in the vast middle deserves the traumatic horrors engulfing them in Southern California. Money—no matter how much—cannot be a salve for the pain of watching one’s own home and neighbors’ homes and the entire communities they formed go up in flames. The images I have seen on television and online from Pacific Palisades and the Hollywood Hills and surrounding areas are too hard to see, but impossible to forget. They linger like photographs of Nazi concentration camps—unfathomable horrors that will not release the viewer from the terror of their origins. The photographs and videos make one wonder how—or whether—physical and emotional recovery ever may be possible.
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Here I sit, in my warm and comfortable house, awaiting the expected 4 to 8 inches of snow that’s anticipated to start falling by noon today. That threat, even if realized and accompanied by power outages, does not begin to compare to the ordeal facing the people of Southern California. Oprah Winfrey, of all people, is quoted as saying, “Be thankful for what you have and you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.” The first six of those words are the only ones that matter: be thankful for what you have. The philosophy underlying those words have been drilled into me my entire life. Too often, I allow myself to ignore the concept, permitting myself instead to want more. Or different. Or something other than what should be more than enough.
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Yesterday, unless something dramatic changes, I had the last radiation session to treat the resurgence of my cancer. A tad less than three weeks hence, I will get another chemotherapy treatment. Then, either a PET-scan or another chemo treatment, followed by a PET-scan. I am grateful I did not reject treatment six years ago, which I considered doing. I would have been long dead by now, had I made that foolish decision.
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Credit: Joshua Coogler
A pink glow above the horizon watches over me. Or maybe it’s just my eyes, looking up at the vastness of an endless sky. Last night, I thought about how incredibly tiny our planet is against the backdrop of the limitlessly vast universe. And I thought about some macro photos of ants, taken by photographers who shared their techniques with fellow aficionados. This morning, thoughts of how tiny we are against the universe, and tiny ants are against our miniscule size swirled in my head. It’s just too incredible to explain! And it’s even more amazing that, for example, each tiny hair or sections of the ants’ eyes are enormously large in comparison to individual atoms. Sometimes, the complexity and beauty of the world around me brings me to euphoric delight. These photographs (credit to Joshua Coogler) add to my amazement…actually seeing what is often right before me, but which I rarely actually see. Click on the image; be amazed!
