Up early this morning, I was drown by my Ipad into the new video world, and the many videos of the suffering and destruction in Japan. At first, I felt as if I were watching a TV show or sci-fi movie. Then I showed one of the videos to Maria, of a store clerk struggling to hold up an enormous shelf filled with glass jars, a hopeless task for so small a person, and an impossible one, as glasses and jars and tin cans rained down all around her.  I was a reporter for many years, and was so used to seeing people injured and living amidst ruin.

Maria cried and I was grateful to that, as she reminded me that I was not watching a movie, or a sci-fi film, but real people struggling with real fear and loss. And I needed to feel real things. Thinking of them all.

“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief…For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

—  Wendell Berry