Tornadoes--life and death

After the tornadoes of last night, I, and millions of others, find myself confronting fragile mortality again.  So many people lost their lives--at last count, 28 people who were alive and vital just yesterday are no more.  They are simply gone, erased from a planet rapidly growing more and more inhospitable to our kind.  As I watched the news this morning, it was with a deep sense of anguish, and felt the odd catch in my breath as I identified with the losses.  I understood my life, too, could have become a statistic, but it wasn't my turn.

When I went to bed last night, dire warnings filled my head, I wondered if it would be my time to experience death. Blessed sleep overtook me, while others experienced hell not far away. Death is present in every breath we take, every sneeze we make, and each tiny bug we casually squash underfoot, but the reality of the kind of monumental loss from the massive erasure of a big storm, or that of volcanic activity,or tsunami is something for which we cannot prepare.  As one man said this morning, his community thought they were prepared, but the storm was bigger than they were.

The sight of a mobile home pad covered with debris was especially disturbing, since just last year the mobile home that previously occupied the same site was also destroyed in a tornado.  It's easy to grow complacent when life seems "normal," but perhaps it's time we realized normalcy as we experienced it is a thing of the past.  For whatever reason,   we live in precarious times--the weather is not predictable, and its violence is increasing.  Perhaps it really is time to live in the moment.