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Nov. 6, 2005 I perched on my usual place at the cemetery today, a broken down old gravestone with no name. The wind burst through the old maples and sycamores at about thirty-five to forty miles per hour. I watched my dog as she ran around the tombstones throwing caution to the blasting wind. We do this every Sunday. It’s kind of a cathartic experience for us both. I learned of the devastation to southern Indiana and parts of Kentucky just before Nina and I went for our Sunday romp. Last count showed nine dead and many critically injured by a horrific creation of nature, the tornado. My wife and I have been fortunate this year. We live in the north central part of Indiana. I say “this year” because tornadoes generally aren’t discriminatory in their paths of destruction. As I sat there watching the trees sway, I thought how much people are similar to the basic elements of our environment. Leaves have left most of the trees this year and are scattered thickly on the ground. When the wind would gust to about forty miles an hour, the leaves already on the ground would appear to run to another spot. They would run until they smashed into another tombstone or the trunk of a neighboring tree. Fascinating, how much we resemble those leaves. When we are faced with adversity, we get off our haunches and run, sometimes into our own barriers, be they social, be they natural. Instead of turning our minds into the wind of adversity, we run from it or we fly with it; often, to no avail. If I may, I would like to speak figuratively. We run from those things we fear or things we don’t understand. There are many I’m sure, who would disagree with that premise. For example, some would say we didn’t run from those bastards that blew up our beautiful trade center. I would have to agree with them to an extent, but we did run. We ran without thinking. We ran into a Muslim culture that is quite similar to one of those old gravestones I spoke of earlier. We ran. We ran ourselves into a barrier and many of our leaves have been destroyed. How many more leaves will run from the winds of Logic and Reason? We fear nature. We fear it because it is so much more powerful than us, but there is more to it I think. We are jealous of nature. Why? Nature will be here when we die. We “will” die and we run from death. Humankind has been running from death since the very first two-legged creature stepped across the carcasses of his or her ancestors. We have dreamed dreams of eternity. We have written stories of life after life, but death catches us before our stories are finished...and nature lives on. To quote one of my favorite artists, Don Henley, and I paraphrase, “there are just so many summers, baby.” Isn’t it so? Each of us carry a breeze of anxiety with us. Each of us asks, “How many summers do I have left?” How many more times will I be able to walk up those cemetery steps and touch the fingers of nature? No one knows the answer.
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