A few weeks ago I reported how the unexpected can be taken two ways, in a negative or positive way. Today I had all kinds of plans to do work when two unexpected things happened. The major one was that a friend called this morning sounding very sick and asking for a ride to the doctor’s office. At the appointed time I went to her apartment to get her and discovered that she had been calling from work. She has been working in the same position for ten years, ever since arriving with two young girls from war-torn Sierra Leone. She was afraid that if she called in sick on a Friday her boss might be thinking she was taking a long weekend and she would lose her job. Because of this delay in getting her we were 15 minutes late in getting to the clinic. Since we were late we had to wait for an hour and half for her to see a doctor. Now this unexpected happening might have been a waste of time if it did not give me a chance to read a book called “Earth Democracy, Justice, Sustainability and Peace” by an Indian, Vandana Shiva
It is a book about nature economics and democracy. She starts the book with a quote attributed to Chief Seattle. “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us…This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites our family. All things are connected.” She goes on to describe how we in the Western world have taken the “commons” things that belong to us and divided it up and privatized it for profit. In the area of food she describes how large agribusiness have made food more expensive and less healthy and how we need to return to a decentralized but connected system of production producing inexpensive healthy food.
During the five hours of taking my friend to the clinic, back to work for her medication, to the drugstore for a prescription and back home, I picked up a friend from Chicago who unexpectedly had come in town. All the running around we did meant that I missed our monthly luncheon of the DMZ garden with Dawn and Marna. I had asked Dawn and Marna to save me a piece of Marna’s delicious homemade pecan pie. When we went over to Marna’s she had not only a whole pie for us but treated us to an old fashioned homemade meal. For my friend who lives alone in Chicago this meal was a real treat.
So Nature is full of the unexpected but if we look at the unexpected as a blessing it will be. One of things I expected to do today was to convert my eight small windows into four-pane windows. I did not do it. Tomorrow we expect snow in the afternoon, so I’d better take care of the storm windows in the morning, or pray that sometimes the expected is the unexpected.
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