vegetationlessness.

it was tuesday and my mom really wanted me to go with her to the eve worship service at her church (which is a smaller, guitar-player-friendly sort of deal that mom has described as 'hip' -- which is not super descriptive since 'hip' is a word she only knows how to use with a very deliberate and very misplaced over-emphasis). so i went. with both of my folks. sat in like the 4th or 5th pew. there was a lot of singing, which grooves with me. (the dude who talked had an almost-silly nervousness to him; but had just gotten back from haiti -- from a town which, a couple months back, woke up one day to see a 15-foot wall of water coming at them. he had all these pictures; of his friend standing where the school he's principal of used to be. about 225 kids in his school -- 50 of whom got carried away by the water wall. and that was just: wow. it's literally beyond the scope of my imagination. it's hard enough just to return my imagination to the crazy-lucid detail that happens in that time of kid-ness; i tried, last night, and got it there for just a second. but then i tried to imagine walking down the road and having my school not be there, having all of the vegetation around it -- not just the trees; ALL of the Vegetation -- just. not be. anymore. my head was already defunct in its efforts to conceptualize any of that, and i wasn't yet to the part where 50 kids from my neighborhood have gone away, too. and as i'm busy lightly flagellating myself for lack of compassion and such, i look up and the dude has flipped to the next slide, which is a shot of him surrounded by a dozen or so children from the town -- age 6-13 or so -- wearing all the clothes they own in the world. which is what they were wearing when the wall came. which in two cases is nothing. and they've got these f'ing SMILES happening: not pose-with-whitey weirdness kind of smiles, or even this-moment-offers-welcome-respite-from-our-hellish-lives smiles; they were to sly for that. the heads cocked with a little too much perspective. there was honest-to-f'ing-god joy that could be seen in their faces, even in a group photo, even from the 4th or 5th pew of a church 4000 miles from there.) ...huh. looks like my parenthetical aside turned out to be my whole deal, here. oh well. so, that's one thing i'll say for my first hip-service last night: it did re-align, however slightly or briefly, my stubborn precepts about how and where contentment/relief/joy are found in this mess.