Ostriches

I’m duped, baffled. I feel as effective as a tree holding back the sea breeze from the mainland. Perhaps, if someone hides directly behind me, I might provide a modicum of shelter, but even so my tree is scarce, boney and bare. The sea breeze isn’t always terrible; on summer days it cools the world, and at nights pulls the heat out over the waters. But storms rise from its mystical depths, and its ferocious rains batter the mountainsides. Against these I, too, am battered.

Life can be hard, joyful, beautiful, and cruel. Everything is like an Escher painting, and my words follow a non-Euclidean progression, a backwards-sideways mumbo-jumbo whose incomprehensibility offers no solace for the wounded. Is there solace for the wounded?

But this is me. Some people can form massive, thin sheets that block much of the stinging storm, or towers that blot out the sky and shift weather patterns, or vast hillsides that form a rain-shadow against the mightiest of winds, but I am made for one small frame at a time, and even then I do little to stop the rain and the cold from getting in.

Ostriches don’t bury their heads in the sand from fear, but swallow sand and pebbles to help them digest. I keep telling myself that, but who am I fooling?

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/08/ostriches/ ‎