Rebirth

[J.Patrick]

Back in 2013 the terrible Camarillo Springs fire ravaged the Santa Monica Mountains, just south east of my home. Most everything was reduced to dust and ashes, and the trees were blackened, leafless and seemed dead. I was walking there this last week, doing a 7 mile training walk for the Francigena, maybe this next fall, and was overwhelmed by the beauty of rebirth. It made me think of a post-covid world, perhaps now visible some months away, and I felt hopeful.

I hope you're feeling the stirrings of hope as well! Ultreïa! Et suseïa!

 

[VNwalking]

beauty of rebirth. It made me think of a post-covid world, perhaps now visible some months away, and I felt hopeful.

Thank you this reminder that regeneration and repair can happen. It's so easy to get stuck in the difficult experience day to day, forgetting the big picture.

We've all had it pretty easy, actually.
My grandparents were among the millions who lived through the 1918 flu epidemic, the great depression, and two world wars. And they were the least complaining people I've ever known. In the end, things will come back together — we can be sure of this. It won't be exactly the same, but then it wouldn't be anyway, even without Covid-19.

 

[pelerine]

Thank you, J. Patrick, for sharing! And VN, for telling us about your grandparents! Mine were the same! One forgets too easily....

 

[lt56ny]

Thank you this reminder that regeneration and repair can happen. It's so easy to get stuck in the difficult experience day to day, forgetting the big picture.

We've all had it pretty easy, actually.
My grandparents were among the millions who lived through the 1918 flu epidemic, the great depression, and two world wars. And they were the least complaining people I've ever known. In the end, things will come back together — we can be sure of this. It won't be exactly the same, but then it wouldn't be anyway, even without Covid-19.

The work ethic of our grandparents and view of life is in many cases in countries such as the United States a bygone era. Many years ago I taught school for a couple of years. We were studying immigration. I told my class the story of my father, my uncles and grandparents. With $200 my grandfather opened a small business manufacturing garbage and ash cans in New York City. (Ash cans were very heavy and strong galvanized metal garbage cans that coal ash would be shoveled into). He opened just a few months before the crash of 1929. I told my class about a conversation I had with my grandfather shortly before his death. It came up because my dad told me the only vacation my grandparents took was that they somehow got to England in 1944 to visit their sons who were all there before the Normandy invasion. How they got there no one knows but they did. Anyway I found out in that conversation that not only did my grandfather not take a day off except for Shabbat (Friday night to Saturday night, we are Jewish), he did not even take a paycheck. He put every penny back into the business. My dad's family lived in the back of a New York City candy store (kind of like a luncheonette) that my grandmother and her brother my Great Uncle Harry owned and ran. Harry and Bertha and their kids lived in the other small apartment next door. I was shocked by this. When I asked him why he simply said. I worked so my boys would have a business to raise their families and to give him and Mama (what he called my grandmother) grandchildren. That absolutely blew me away. I had tears in my eyes with respect and admiration for this man. Of course his story was just one of, I am sure hundreds of thousands of similar stories of European immigrants and these types of stories and selfless sac rife continue today with the worldwide influx of immigrants today. Men and women who make the same sacrifice and do so gladly for a better life.
Unfortunately my class, which I do not know if it is because most of them had been in the United States for many generations, appreciated. Many made comments like that is weird, or what was wrong with him. I stayed calm and tried to explain but maybe because of youth my words mostly fell on deaf ears. This is of course speculation as I have nothing to concretely back up my conclusion.
We could all use a little more of that kind of selfless dedication today to defeat this virus and many other challenges we face. Please wear a mask, it is not a right to choose it is a moral obligation to do so.

 

[pelerine]

.....and if I understand the situation correctly, you had just opened your own albergue before the first lockdown in Spain, so no more pligrims to come to it. I have been wondering how you are doing???

Lots of good wishes for lots of courage!

 

[Priscilla NC]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, what my grandparents and even my parents went through. My father was born in 1917, my mother in 1919. Neither of my grandfathers were in WW 1, I wonder why. And not only did my grandparents rarely complain, they took each day as it came, with few expectations of how their lives might 'improve'. Both maternal and paternal grandparents eventually did well, but I know it did not come overnight or easily.

My parents married as my father left for the US Navy in WW II. They went through a lot, though they rarely talked about it and just soldiered on (so to speak). I never asked a lot of questions and, being a Boomer, never really thought about all of this. My life has been relatively easy. I now have a very small family, so I can't get answers to a lot of my questions about how my ancestors navigated their times.

With the pandemic, I heartily believe that regeneration/resurrection will happen, though perhaps not in my lifetime.

 

[ginniek]

I live on the southeastern coast of the US, where our longest season is the Hurricane Season (officially over Monday, Nov. 30). It happens every year, but we don't actually get hit every year. And we know how to prepare, and we get warnings. COVID is still pretty much an unknown, and I think that is why it's so unnerving.