Comment: We are meaning-seeking creatures

  • Heidi Herzog Gonzales, FMHS Class of 1998, now from the U.S. Virgin Islands, is here on a mission.

    Heidi Herzog Gonzales, FMHS Class of 1998, now from the U.S. Virgin Islands, is here on a mission.

~~Some thoughts, by Patric Hedlund, TME

We are all meaning-seeking, meaning-creating creatures and when we experience the loss of meaning, we suffer. —James Hollis

A LONG TIME AGO, IN A UNIVERSE FAR, FAR AWAY I worked to receive academic degrees to make my profession the study of Change. Perhaps that should equip me today to look at what we have experienced in the past four weeks, and make some sense of it.

The good news? We have not yet engaged in a nuclear war with North Korea.
The bad news? Just about everything else.

A cascade of Category Five hurricanes literally turned paradise after paradise into splinters and sticks, forests without standing trees, homes with no roofs, ships upside down and broken into pieces, farms and crops scrubbed off the earth, the comforts of life, even drinkable water and light, sucked away in massive winds and washed out of grasp.

The hurricanes were punctuated by not one, but two, earthquakes in Mexico of the size that scientists say are long overdue to occur along our own section of the San Andreas Fault at any time now.

Then on October 1 at 10:05 p.m. the mass shooting in Las Vegas began. Over 21,000 people just peacefully sitting on the grass listening to country music were suddenly swept into a solitary, dissociated human’s private war of mass destruction. Fifty-eight people lost their lives, almost 500 were wounded.

This week the fear we all have of wildfire crazily lurching into populated areas and vaporizing people’s lives literally into smoke became a reality in Sonoma, Napa and Orange Counties. The number of homes lost, the number of lives lost, is almost impossible to comprehend.

Stick with me here, because this does go somewhere better.

The pundits who we’ve heard saying “chaos is the new normal” are talking about political chaos. Now we are all witnessing the overwhelming chaotic forces of Nature. And here is the little glimmer of hopeful light.

On Tuesday a letter came from Girard and Verena Herzog Mollayan.
Their daughter Heidi from the U.S. Virgin Islands is here asking for some simple kindness for her neighbors back home.

She is asking that we do what we can to help provide the simplest necessities to people who are working to put their universe and their hearts and their daily lives back together.

Here is Heidi’s note

“This is a list of things we need: hand sanitizer, flashlights, headlamps, towels, soap, laundry soap, hammers, car phone chargers, portable phone chargers, baby wipes , first aid kits…and socks. Thank you, Heidi Gonzales”

Each of us can think of probably 20 things to add to that list immediately. But what a simple request like this does is pull us out of the contemplation of overwhelming chaos back into a knowledge that gives us meaning: We can help.

Helping bestows a small bit of order back into a universe that seemed to have flown apart this month.

See the story on page 7.

Photo captions:

Heidi Herzog Gonzalez, FMHS Class of 1998, now from the U.S. Virgin Islands, is here on a mission.

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This is part of the October 13, 2017 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

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