Loggers call them widowmakers: broken limbs or tree-tops that snag on the forest canopy, dangling and threatening to fall without warning. After tropical storm Irene gave our Newton neighborhood a thorough pruning last weekend, all that’s left of the wind and rain are a handful of blow-downs that never quite blew down.
In the immediate aftermath of Irene, it was prudent to watch your step, since our neighborhood was littered with leafy twigs, brittle sticks, and one ominous-looking cable that snaked across our street, the area cordoned off with red hazard tape. Once all those twigs and sticks had been gathered into trash barrels, leaf bags, and twine-tied piles, you’d best keep your head up when you walked, on the lookout for hazards overhead.
Now that I’ve spent the past week looking for widowmakers, I seem to find them everywhere: not just the new ones from Irene, but old seasoned specimens from past storms. The treetops, it turns out, are simply littered with broken limbs and dangling branches, each threatening to succumb to gravity at any minute. Who has time to watch their step when so much danger looms from above?
Humans are fragile creatures, thin-skinned and vulnerable. We live much of our lives in our heads, oblivious to the dangers that surmount them. With our heads, we think we can control our fate by being careful: if we watch our steps, watch our diet, and look both ways, we’re all but guaranteed a long and healthy life. The widowmaker called Time looms to prove otherwise. No matter how carefully we try to control our destinies, an oncoming car careens out of control, a cancer diagnosis strikes like lighting out of the blue, or a precariously dangling tree limb succumbs to gravity. You just never know what is hanging directly overhead, held by the thinnest thread.
Time itself is a widowmaker, as is history. Ten years ago this week, a crisp September day began like any other until not one but three planes sliced our lives into the separate segments of Before and After. As the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, I keep thinking of the so-called falling man, a worker who jumped from the World Trade Center rather than waiting to succumb to fire and smoke. In his iconic picture, the falling man hangs upside down and aloft, his legs crooked like a runner. Who knew that morning what horrors awaited: who knew then how many flying souls would fall?
On my commute from Newton to Keene, a church marquee asks, “Tornadoes, earthquakes, and hurricanes: how prepared are you?” Although I might quibble with the sign’s theology, I agree wholeheartedly with its urgency. Not even a single second of our lives is guaranteed; at every moment, the widowmaker of mortality hangs overhead like a sword on a string. It’s fine and good to watch your step, but even our best-made plans pale in a world where we’re left hanging in a forest full of danger, malice, and chance.
Sep 5, 2011 at 3:55 pm
Of course, it’s equally full of beauty, love, and opportunity.
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Sep 5, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Like you, I am often more reminded of danger, malice, and chance than the beauty, love, and opportunity mentioned by Loren.
In spite of the subject matter and the tone, this a lovely meditation on chance. Thanks for sharing it with us.
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Sep 5, 2011 at 4:28 pm
Loren and Maria, I think it’s the awareness of danger, malice, and chance that brings the beauty, love, and opportunity into sharper focus. If everything were beauty, love, and opportunity, I think we’d grow accustomed to them: we’d basically take these things for granted.
Knowing that life is short and that nothing but this present moment is guaranteed, I am that much more intent on finding the beauty, love, and opportunity among the widowmakers. Urgency is borne from threat, and that urgency pushes one toward a greater awareness of all things, both bad and good.
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Sep 6, 2011 at 8:42 pm
I don’t think there’s ever been any shortage of beauty, love and opportunity at hoarded ordinaries. Danger, malice, and chance deserve their seat at the table.
I don’t hear a dark view of the world in what you say. In a way it’s just the opposite – a kind of marveling at any moment that happens to be just plain lovely, and taking notice when it’s so. It’s gratitude!
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Sep 7, 2011 at 2:08 am
You have to simply take everything on faith. You have no promises of a tomorrow, but only the memories of today and yesterday.
Awareness within our environment can lead to hearing the “forest”, with its cracking limbs, soft breezes and whispers of creatures that mingle on the forest floor.
If you only live in fear of what can happen in all probably you will miss hearing what the forest and nature is saying to you.
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Sep 7, 2011 at 7:13 pm
With threatening storms, illness, and now the 9/11 10-year reflections airing on the news, not to mention ongoing economic threats, life does seem perilous these days even realizing how much worse off we could be living in war-torn regions of the world. As you say, there’s only the moment and our attention and love that we can choose.
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Sep 10, 2011 at 4:04 am
Excellent post! In fact, I think I’ll link to it tomorrow. You said it better than I ever could.
I agree with your belief that awareness of danger brings beauty into sharper focus. Despite daily hazards, we live in relatively secure times, when all of us can reasonably expect to see another day and, in fact, enjoy that day. It’s useful to remember that we all exist at the mercy of chance and circumstance!
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