How can I sleep when our earth is breaking up?
How can I dance when our land is flooding?
How can I dream when my sisters and brothers are suffering?
How can I imagine the devastation of a giant tsunami wave that destroyed entire villages and thousands of lives in minutes?

I wake with a black eye surrendering in disrupted sleep to the violence of nightmares. Aghast, I wake speechless overwhelmed even before the dawn has broken. Too readily tears well in my eyes and form a permanent tear. There is no space in my sensibility for the tears to clear. The grief so close to the surface I become a stunned being in this human form trapped inside the vortex of post trauma.

Gasp!

2011 was never meant to be like this.

As we roll from one catastrophe to the next how can we recover and heal our wounds? The earth deals us so many mighty blows in succession we are left gasping for breath. We hold tight to our sanity as we cling to our rationality hoping that it will save us.

Words are not enough. We need to find a new way of communicating the feelings that are triggered from tragic events of such magnitude they are taken beyond our understanding. Derrida where are you with your new words and perspectives that give meaning to our new life far Beyond The Post? Rawness of our status can not be comforted by the surface matrix of Postmodernism.

The ring of fire grumbles as the earth smoulders and we brace ourselves for what will come next. We pray for reprieve for recovery and wish for this perpetual devastation to end as the whole world slips into the Bell Jar.

No smoke or mirrors or burying of our heads can take away the plethora of disaster that has berated our planet at the start of 2011. No matter how deeply we dream for it not to be so, we cannot take away the fact that it is. It is there right in front of us in sharp unrelenting colour scene by scene, blow by blow.

The challenge is to find ways to cope as we struggle for new levels of compassion and deeper levels of sensitivity that spring us to action to support the people, the countries of the world that are being struck by the most current disaster. It is heart warming to see this taking place to a greater degree with each escalating disaster.

I pray for us to find a new way of being together and containing each other in these extremely terrifying times. I feel a great unease and in my silence I imagine a way through this trauma to a place of recovery where our dreams can be sweet again and reality does not bite so hard.

© Anthea Slade 2011