Fleeting beauty in a harsh universe

But despite all the bad news, there are fleeting moments of beauty. This week, my cousin, a photographer, married another artist, in the American southern state of Tennessee. In a marriage of God-and-human-made beauty, they spoke their vows in an art museum, on a stone floor in front of a gigantic window overlooking a river. […]

But despite all the bad news, there are fleeting moments of beauty. This week, my cousin, a photographer, married another artist, in the American southern state of Tennessee. In a marriage of God-and-human-made beauty, they spoke their vows in an art museum, on a stone floor in front of a gigantic window overlooking a river.
I write now from the top floor of a double decker bus that has traveled north through the night towards Chicago. It is a calm morning, a blue sky fleecy with clouds, green fields, tipped with gold corn tassels, stretching to the horizons. A whole farm of wind turbines rises above the corn, steadily rotating to convert wind into electricity. The wind turbines above the green and gold fields, the internet on the bus as we skim past, makes me think of science fiction dreams of what could be, of optimistic visions of a future where food is plentiful, energy is green, communication is rapid, and there is peace on earth. The serene order outside the bus windows is a fitting conclusion to the joyful insanity of the weekend full of family and food and flowers and laughter.
But I am haunted by how fragile such happiness is. By the jarring juxtaposition of the blissful insularity the privileged often choose and the horrorson the earth that threaten to obliterate all peace, all happiness, all beauty. As our family prepared for my cousin’s wedding, I spent several days without going online. The few times I quickly checked my email, I saw fleeting news of bombs in Kano, attacks on Yobe, an upsurge of female suicide bombers, as the girls from Chibok remain missing. Wars and rumours of wars. In the hotel lobby, CNN and Fox News blared, on competing TVs, endless news of the crisis in Gaza and Ukraine. The headline “Ebola’s Spread Gaining Speed” screamed from the front page of USA Today, the small print assuring Americans that they are not at risk. As if America were somehow immune from the rest of the universe.
At 7:30am on the morning of the wedding, I went down to the empty hotel pool. As I floated, I gazed up into the blue sky. I felt like I was floating on a mirror. I thought of how small we all are here scrabbling around on the surface of this ball of earth and water and gas. How small we are, hurtling through space filled with stars that dwarf our own. We pass over stone, leaving no footprints. We wilt as fast as the flowers blooming for a day on the table of a marriage feast, or in a field under the fierce sun.
Scientists have recently published a report of a solar storm in 2012: the sun sent out plasma clouds that only narrowly missed destroying electrical infrastructure on earth. If the plasma had hit the earth, much of the world could have been sent back to 19th century conditions. According to physicist Pete Riley in a paper published in Space Weather, there is a 12% chance that such an event could yet happen in this decade. We depend on the sun for nourishment and life, yet it could so easily destroy us. In a less planetary, yet still potentially global natural disaster, the mysterious ebola virus rages across West Africa. The fast-acting disease has so far killed over 670 people this year. There are no vaccinations, no known cures. Threats of destruction come both from a gigantic sun and a microscopic virus.
And yet we human beings, little parasites clawing over the skin of the earth, join the universe in trying to off ourselves, killing those who love learning, love God, love life, love Love, those who seek to make a better earth. Over the last few weeks, deaths resulting from hatred and selfishness rival those from natural causes. Indeed many of those deaths even of “natural” causes could be prevented if humans in positions of responsibility did their jobs. Boko Haram rages across borders, bombing, kidnapping, making rabid promises they faithfully keep. On 15 July, Human Rights Watch reported that Boko Haram has killed at least 2053 civilians in 2014, a number that goes up every day. I mourn for my adopted home in Kano, which has most recently lost people in bombs in churches, colleges, motorparks, and petrol stations. Over Ukraine, separatists (it seems) senselessly shot down239 people on commercial Flight MH370. Among the dead were Joep Lange, one of the world’s top AIDS researchers and an activist for increasing access of antiretroviral therapies in Africa. How many would have died if it were not for him? How many will die now because he is gone? In Iraq, the extremist group ISIS expels a community of Christians nearly as old as Christianity itself. In Gaza, the Israelis reenact against their Palestinian neighbours the prejudice many of their ancestors experienced in Nazi Germany. Like Boko Haram, the Israeli army attacks schools at night, like Rwandan genocidaires they kill people seeking refuge in educational institutions, people who believed they would be protected by the UN. How quickly the persecuted become the persecutor. How quickly the victim of genocide becomes a perpetrator of similar atrocities.
At the root of it all is hatred, a corrosive poison growing from its mythic beginnings when, only a generation out of Paradise, Cain killed his brother Abel, to the mass murders of today, massacres that have grown so usual they hardly make the news. The politics, resentments, and jealousies of a few multiply to murder many. The universe doesn’t need to kill us, we are doing a good enough job on our own.
It’s at times like this that I think of the biblical book of Job, of the Psalmists, who cry out in despair to God and are answered with enigmatic reminders about the size of the universe and how small we are on the surface of it, how quickly we bloom and fade away, like grass, like flowers that blow away on the wind. Generations of poets and theologians have struggled with such cryptic responses in the scriptures, yet these days I find comfort in reminders that our lives fit into a much larger pattern, in hope that we may someday make meaning of, find redemption in, such senseless suffering.
Last night, I sat in a cramped bus seat somewhere in middle America, my phone and computer batteries dying. Outside the window was darkness. I tried to sleep, tried to stay warm in too-cold air conditioning by tucking my feet into my skirt and huddling my head in my arms. In the night, my neighbor and I moved closer together in our sleep. In my semi-woken state, as I fitfully dreamed of bombs, I could feel her arm touching mine, warmth in the touch of a sleeping stranger. We traveled miles in the dark like that, down an unknown road.
Maybe it’s our job as human beings to find metaphors in ordinary life, hope in human touch. Maybe these imagined symbols are what keeps us going.