Hope and Love

3-14-11 sad brain

This weekend I was thinking about something I had heard in a sermon about 10 years ago…. Something about the Chinese symbol for Crisis was composed of the symbol meaning danger and opportunity…. I liked the thought of that, as I was thinking about Japan’s heartbreaking earthquake and tsunami.

As I was preparing to blog about this topic, I decide to Google this Chinese symbol, which lead me to an essay by a professor of Chinese language which tells that this interpretation of the word crisis is wishful thinking, and a misunderstanding about how terms are formed in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages.

See here to read more: 

http://pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html

I think I was under this misunderstanding in 2004, when I wrote a poem about the Tsunami in Indonesia. I was focused on the destruction some how evolving into an opportunity. However, I’m not feeling this way so much this weekend in regards to Japan.

I think the pictures from Japan are too much like the possible destruction would be in the US. Japan is a modern country, with modern living conditions such as we do, and they have a strong organized government who worries about its economy and jobs, just like us.

So when I see the pictures of destruction there, I can see the possibility of this also happening one day to a city on our west coast, or even St. Louis they say, due to the New Madrid fault line, in the middle of the country.

Nature is a powerful force, and I guess that just needs to be an accepted fact. Is the best we humans can put up against that powerful force is love and hope?


Here is my poem and above was the artwork that went with it.

“Opportunity”
(Tsunami Poem 1-10-05)
By Judy Sebern Beachy
Buildings shattered into piles of splinters,
Homes no longer safe havens,
Are now tombs of despair.
Bodies swept up in the water,
A wave of destruction washes away their future.
This is reality TV,
Raw anguish, uncensored.

Instead, can we imagine a new possibility?
Perhaps a fantasy or a possible truth,
Spoken as a prayer-
Please let this wave be an opportunity,
An opportunity for love.

An odd sort of dream,
When creation destroys itself, to renew itself,
A scenario mankind can not easily comprehend.
Yet, each minute we are dying,
Heads us closer towards our own rebirth.
Hope is buoyant, ever floating,
As long as there is an opportunity,
An opportunity to love.