Bird flu, mortality, immortality and related crap

Kastamonu, Samsun, Erzurum... if things were different, I might have been there now: the eye in the storm of a full blown family panic. As it is, I never made it to any of Kastamonu, Samsun, Erzurum.

I am concerned for Turkey and of course for when the jump will be made, but in a very detached sort of way.

I am not concerned about like whether I will get it. I will take my precautions, and if I am to outlive the pandemic, then I outlive the pandemic and tell the tale later. If I am to go in the pandemic in an unmarked mass grave with lime poured on top of me - well, yes, that sucks, but I'll be dead - so no sweat. We all die, you know. Whether we have managed to do all we want to do so that when we go we can feel we have justified our time here is something different completely. We are all dieing. Question is what are we doing about it - not about the fact that we are mortal, about the fact that once we are gone, we are gone. We can't write bullshit 15-syllable poems after death now, can we? We can't draw in chalk and charcoal after death.

We can't - but who is to say that so many of the other pleasures of life are lost? Who is to say that the sunset is lost, or that the crashing of the waves on the rocks is lost and who is to say that the joy to be gained from a nicely stratified and folded piece of limestone is lost? We are part of the natural world and we return to it. While we are alive, our bodies and our humanity prevent us from being one with the rocks, one with the trees, one with the surging sea and one with the stars as they wheel over the earth in their great circles.

"Why would I want to be one with the hermit crab chasing the tidal pools lest it dry in the heat of the sun?" I hear you cry... "Why would I want to be one with the arctic poppy as it twists itself continuously around chasing the never setting sun?"

I need to write more about nature and mans place both within and outside nature. I have no time now. I have a pandemic to panic about.