Charles Farley
  • Home
  • About
  • Books
  • Contact
  • Order
  • Blog

Cherry Blossoms

4/22/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
I was thinking this week about how fragile our bodies are and how tenuous our lives sometimes seem.  My kids were asking me if I had ever seen anything like this coronavirus thing before in my life time.
I told them about the spread of polio when I was a kid.  How we couldn't go swimming in a public pool.  The whispers and fear in the eyes of our parents when the disease was mentioned.  How, when I was 9 or 10, I was among the 1.8 million early test subjects for the new vaccine developed by Jonas Salk.  
I also recalled SARS, avian influenza, swine flu, Zika, Ebola, and other scares.  "Yes, but," they pushed, "anything like this?"
Then I thought again and remembered the worst of it.  My best friend in Battle Creek, where we were both new high school teachers, fresh out of college.  And my old high school buddy and later best man at my first wedding.  Both lost at young ages along with more than 30 million others to the AIDS epidemic, which our other TV star president, Ronald Reagan, as our present one, largely ignored until it was too late.
When I wrote The Hotel Monte Sano, I discovered why the mountain resort was so popular.  In the late 1800's, people in the packed, low-lying cities of America were dying at alarming rates from typhoid, cholera, measles, and tuberculosis, and the hotel, on top of a "mountain of health" promised some respite.
So this new virus is nothing new as far as sickness, death, and pain are concerned.  And once again we are reminded of how precious life is and how we owe it to ourselves and to our neighbors to be kind, gracious, generous, loving, and thankful for what little time we have here.
It brings to mind the Buddhists among us who see our life as a "floating world"--like cherry blossoms, a brief flowering in the cycle of reincarnation and dissolution. 

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Charles Farley is an author who lives and writes in Huntsville, Alabama.

    Archive

    January 2023
    December 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    January 2018
    March 2016
    October 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    October 2014
    August 2014
    September 2013
    July 2013
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photo used under Creative Commons from Kitty Terwolbeck