Tuesday, February 25, 2014

I Missed the Better Metaphor

One picture is worth a thousand words.  So said, well, we’re not sure, but generally, the saying is attributed to an advertising guy in the early 1900's, who attributed it to an unnamed Japanese philosopher.

Today there’s an evocative photograph on the Weather Channel’s site from photographer Jonathan Pow.  I can’t find the picture anywhere else than on someone’s FB share, so I don’t know if it was genuinely a photograph of a found visual (as opposed to something created then photographed), but the photo is evocative.

It shows more than thirty unexploded ordinance lying on a beach on a sunny day.  The picture on FB, at least, was attached to a Weather Channel article on sightings of unexploded WWII bombs on British beaches in the wake of recent flooding there.

In the round of FB comments, one gentleman spoke eloquently from the Native American tradition of the unhealed memories these unexploded bombs probably represent to many who lived through those times, calling we younger ones to patient listening.

His reaction is so much gentler than my own as I behold this visual.

If this be a metaphor, the images that arise in my own mind are of the cost well into an unknown future of the bombs of all kinds we humans make . . . the literal bombs and land mines that explode unsuspecting children into history . . . the waste of war that is witnessed by its debris . . . the monuments to our colossal pride and foolishness that are the rusted leavings of an invading conqueror . . .

I missed the metaphor of healing entirely . . .

How grateful am I to be reminded that the intrusion of the past into the present, while potentially dangerous, can also be a healing place, that it remains entirely up to us to decide.

So for every gun, every bullet, kept in every old soldier’s dresser drawer . . . for every picture of comrades-in-arms long gone stowed away in a box of papers hidden from daily view . . . for every smoke-filled screen archived safely into a past waiting to be rediscovered . . . here’s praying we decide well, for decide, we do.

No comments:

Post a Comment