Pandemic postcard #20: Terrible beauty

"The weirdest part was that the sky was so blue at that point. I never saw the mushroom cloud that you see in the video. I saw the lingering smoke from it ... but it was almost golden hour, so the light was just beautiful." -- New York Times reporter Vivian Yee describing the Beirut explosion aftermath 

Decades of strife 

Inept government 

Waves of refugees

An economy in ruins 

A spike in COVID-19

and then this ...

Explosions rock the port

An ancient city convulses

Strangers tend to strangers' wounds

dressing bloody gashes with splashes of liquor

Grim humor rises anew to greet another catastrophe

"In a land conditioned by calamity, people knew what to do ..." (headline from Vivian Yee's first-person account of the chaos in Beirut after the blasts) 

I am at a loss for more words to say about Lebanon, so I will just marvel yet again at the ways how, when the unimaginable happens, people rise to meet it--and also how people somehow notice beauty even amid the most horrific experiences. 

Read and/or listen to Yee's story.

In this year of layered crises and rolling waves of grief,

on the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 

let us do what we can to help alleviate suffering and prevent it, too. 

Help us know that borders are illusions

and that nationalism is absurd.