We know nothing at all

After two weeks of incarceration I have a dear one home again. Far from knowing too much, it appears we know nothing at all. Nothing that is except closer knowledge of the internal workings of a sick institution that claims the authority to repair human beings but doesn't know how to repair itself.

Sometimes it's hard

I want to write something today but I don't know what it is. Curious how the gravity of external seismic shifts in people's lives - the economy, employment insecurity, natural disasters - have a way of immuring us from the possibility of a personal immanent threat.

Just as the accretion of the last disaster becomes visible, another storm presents itself on the horizon. And the heart / mind wonders at it all. At this moment, this precise moment, there is silent calm and emptiness but there will come an onslaught of confusion, pain and grief. whatever the outcome. There's always an unimaginable impact. Where will it be projected this time? How to manage community expectations? How soon the recovery? For whom will we create an optimistic future? We know too much.

Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie

Is 144 today, or would be had she lived beyond her 67 fruitful years.

To stand on the pavement outside her birthplace in Warsaw in 2006 engendered unexpected dismay. Dismay because I never knew she was Polish, I was never told about her extraordinary life and I should have been. To be ahead of your time, emancipated, independent and uncorrupted by fame are characteristics worth passing on.

There are heroes everywhere, all nations have them as well as their share of villains but it would have really helped my sense of identity had I a few heroes like her in my back pocket where I was growing up. So this here is a birthday gift for Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie. I hope she would forgive the militaristic nature of the heroism portrayed here but her end of life in 1934 meant she didn't have to see what was coming.