The world is its usual rich self. Disturbed news
Came before sleep, then hours before light, finally
A return to coffee and the joy of unfinished poems.
It is early October, bright leaves falling everywhere.
What could it mean that such sharp leaves fall?
Does it imply that the best are called first?
I don’t want to imply that such abundance of meaning
Exists in me. A lamppost shines over
The ocean. The waves take what they want of the
light.
The rest they give back, to the hospitals and the poor.
~Robert Bly from Morning Poems
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.
~Robert Frost “Once By the Pacific”
We were staying with our friends Brian and Bette at their cabin on a bluff just above the beach at Sendai, Japan, just a few dozen feet above the devastation that wiped out an entire fishing village below during the 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami. We walked that stretch, learning of the stories of the people who had lived there, some of whom did not survive the waves that swept their houses and cars away before they could escape. We walked past the footprints of foundations of hundreds of demolished homes, humbled by the rubble mountains yet to be hauled away to be burned or buried and scanned acres of wrecked vehicles now piled one on another, waiting to become scrap metal. It was visual evidence of life suddenly and dramatically disrupted.
This was a place of recreation and respite for some who visited regularly, commerce and livelihood for others who stayed year round. Yet it looked like a foreign ghostly landscape. Even many trees perished, lost, broken off, fish nets still stuck high on their scarred trunks. There were small memorials to lost family members within some home foundations, with stuffed animals and flowers wilting from the recent anniversary observance.
It was a powerful place of memories for those who live there and know what it once was, how it once looked and felt, and painfully, what it became in a matter of minutes on 3/11/11. The waves swept in inexplicable suffering, then carried their former lives away. Happiness gave ground to such terrible pain that could never have hurt as much without the joy that preceded it.
We want to ask God why He doesn’t do something about the suffering that happens anywhere a disaster occurs – but if we do, He will ask us the same question right back. We need to be ready with our answer and our action. He knows suffering. Far more than we do. He took it all on Himself as His Light on earth was snuffed out, despite His love and joy in His creation.
As Sendai’s citizens slowly recover, the inner and outer landscape is forever altered. What remains the same is the tempo of the waves, the tides, and the rhythm of the light and the night, happening just as originally created.
The Light returned.
In that realization, pain gives way. It cannot stand up to His love and His joy in dispelling the dark.
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