Accepting death as part of nature

Feb. 5, 2009

Dear Patty,

As I was readying to leave for a Super Bowl party Sunday afternoon, a thunderous sound made our house shudder. It felt like an earthquake.

DC and I ran out the front door to see what happened, and our neighbor Robyn came out on her porch. She'd heard and felt it, too.

It was an avalanche. A sheet of ice 3 inches thick and as wide as the east side of our tile roof had slid onto the sidewalk in front of our house. Broken pieces of ice were piled 2 feet high. Anyone standing there at the time would have been injured or worse.

Robyn's cat Sunday had been on her porch just before the crash. We looked for Sunday but couldn't find him. Surely the sound scared him away, we said. Surely he wasn't beneath the ice.

Fortunately we were correct, but we didn't know that at the time. With shovels we gingerly dug into the ice, not wanting to harm Sunday further if he was in there, hoping not to encounter anything soft and furry beneath the ice. And we didn't.

Sunday showed up an hour later, perhaps finally satisfied the big noise had gone away.

On a radio show a few days ago someone who'd lived a long time in a wilderness described nature as malevolent. If Sunday or someone else had been hurt by the falling ice, malevolence might explain it. That thought may have occurred to the people inside the maelstrom of Hurricane Katrina and to the hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians trapped in their homes with no heat and no electricity during the recent ice storm.

Our friend Carolyn lost the heat and electricity in her home in Paducah, Ky., and stayed with her next-door neighbor, who had a kerosene heater. Now that Carolyn's heat and electricity have been restored, other friends less fortunate are bedding down at her house. Carolyn has made a long survival list of the heaters and lamps and such she will buy once life returns to normal.

But thinking of nature or the universe as evil means we must consider ourselves evil as well because we are part of Creation. That way of thinking explains a lot.

Albert Einstein said humans will have to adopt a new way of thinking if we are to survive. "A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space," he wrote. "We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness."

This delusion, Einstein said, imprisons us, "restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Even the destruction that is nature's way. Even death.

I'm no Einstein, but maybe Einstein is.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.