Gravity

I don’t look at trees the same way now. Or hawks flying in the air, in the lucky off chance that I actually recognize and can identify one. I pick up random feathers outside my front door and place them on my windowsill, thinking they’re a reminder that you’re close by. I have a collection of dimes that come my way one at a time, all stored in my truck’s center console, “Yankee kisses,” a friend told me in explanation. 

The evening clouds floating across the sky, backlit by nature’s color wheel, pulse in an open invitation to wonder about the miracle of their temporary artistry. A hummingbird feasting on the daily purple blooms outside my window stops me midstream and I pause, my fingers hovering above the keyboard as I watch the tiny bird who hovers, feeding from my flowers.

Are you watching me work the way I watch birds fly, Baby? Are all of these things reminders that you see me and we’re less than a breath apart now?

It’s not as though the colors seem more vivid when I watch the rhythms of life play out beyond my picture windows every day. In truth, everything beautiful took a back seat to the vibrancy that was you when you were here. I hate to admit it, but there’s a tarnish over the world now. Or maybe that’s just a haze that I look through. We loved the mountains, you and me. But when you died there, I knew I’d never forgive them. Now I dream of being near the ocean because its restless yet calming waves echo the longing in my soul for the serenity I lost.

Something has changed in me. I never used to give a thought to heaven except on Sunday mornings as we all sang hymns about a place I’ve never seen and can’t imagine. I believed in it, of course, but I couldn’t identify with it yet. Now I want to know what you’re doing there.

If there is a fourth dimension to living, I guess I’ve found it. Or rather, it has found me. I’m not making that up. Our thirteen-year-old grandson is captivated by the concept of space and time and tells me that time is the fourth dimension. That seems logical since time is invisible, untouchable, elusive, even restless. We can’t capture it or slow it down. It lives outside of us but traps us within its mathematical boundaries.

I guess.

I’m no mathematician.

I think time is the invisible veil that stands between the two of us, baby. You’re outside of it, free as a bird, wholly alive, living out the eternity mankind longs for. While I remain trapped within its parameters, my feet held to this ground by another invisible force—gravity.

You escaped gravity, Baby. Way to go. You’re amazing.

So, the waving trees and their blowing branches. Jesus said we see the effects of the wind, but we don’t see the wind itself. We don’t know where it comes from or where it’s going. We can’t control it. But we know it’s there because we watch the breeze ruffling the leaves.

Everything important is invisible.

I guess this sounds like the ramblings of the woman who loves and misses you. All true. But the moment I knew you escaped the gravity that still holds me down, I began looking for you in the open sky above, searching for you as if by peering at the atmosphere overhead I could spot a tear in its fabric and see you peeking through.

Not exactly Biblical, but since Jesus used a lot of word pictures to try to get his points across, I guess I’m in good company.

Something has changed in me. I don’t just see this moment or that sunset or our grandbabies and children the same way anymore. And I wonder, while I'm staring off into the distance, if your face is inches away from mine wishing I realized you are looking back into my eyes.

Maybe you are.

With many thanks for Nina Canela for permission to use the beautiful artwork seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link:

GRAVITY | ENB + ReShade (my own config) | Nina Canela | Flickr

Questions

I have questions. They go beyond easy answers. Beyond political motives. If they’re that hard to explain, what am I doing analyzing them here as if I can figure things out?

I don’t know. It’s just one more question.

My heart broke two days ago like that of many others when a good and kind man was murdered in public. I assumed people across the board would condemn this brutal act. Some did. Many did not. To my shock, many people on various platforms celebrated the death of a thirty-one-year old husband and father of two. Members of Congress decried a request for one minute of silence to pay respect, yelling in opposition and making fools of themselves.

Which is ironic. Charlie Kirk was murdered for upholding our First Amendment right to free speech, a right guaranteed to every one of us across every persuasion. Even the right for congressmen and women to vehemently object to a request to come together in silence. Instead, they opted to exercise their right to free speech over simple respect for a dead man.

Kindness sometimes leads a person to limit their rights in deference to someone else. Love does that, too.

The same thing happened in a gathering of the EU when a Swedish member of the European Parliament yielded the majority of his speaking time to request a moment of silence on behalf of Charlie Kirk and his family. As some members stood quietly, the majority of the cast of characters exploded in anger like out-of-control school children.

A man was brutally murdered and they refused to acknowledge it. How is that kind of behavior from public officials even human?

And yet. In countries like Spain and Germany and South Africa large gatherings of people lit candles and prayed together. They held photos of Charlie inscribed with condolences in their languages. I didn’t know his influence spread that far. Actually, it was worldwide as leaders across the globe and on every continent expressed their horror and disdain for the cowardly act of violence that took his life.

Like many, I learned he’d been shot via an email I read on my phone. He was still alive at that point and I prayed for his recovery, searching the internet and TV news programming for any updates. It looked bad and soon enough came the word I and others most dreaded.

I’ve spent the last several days trying to put my finger on why this has hit me so hard. I’ve been hit very hard a few times in my life. The most recent was when my beloved husband died more than four years ago. That’s a wound I will live with for the rest of my life. But this shock resonated differently. I finally realized the last time I felt this way was in 2001 when our country was attacked by terrorists we’d never heard of. The horror that spread across the U.S. when the towers fell, the Pentagon was hit, and the 4th plane went down in rural Pennsylvania was a jolt to our sense of security.

Barbara Walters hosted a television special soon after entitled, “Who Is Al-Qaeda And Why Do They Hate Us?” Because most of us in America had no idea who they were or why we were on their radar. We found out why they hated us. We’ve never forgotten. But that was an enemy from without. Now, within, we are falling apart. And yet it’s so difficult to identify why our country is so divided and how to repair the damage. You would think the way forward is through open debate and respect when viewpoints differ. But that requires actually listening to each other.

There’s a good reason that Abraham Lincoln, another martyred man, quoted someone else who was also hated for the things he said. “A house divided cannot stand,” Jesus warned.

We are a house divided.

Are those among us who champion free speech, no matter how vitriolic it is on either side of the aisle, hated for preserving this freedom? Was Charlie hated because he valued the exchange of ideas and invited people into open debate? Is free speech so dangerous that it must be controlled by a partisan government or else stand by while its proponents are put to death?

Someone wrote this week that, “Words are not violence. Violence is violence.” I agreed at first. But reading between the lines and searching the gray area between black and white, now I’m not sure. There are plenty of words currently being slung around that lead to hate and violence, most of them by an irresponsible media. Just ask any Cuban refugee what an authoritarian regime really is. Or an immigrant from China if the Chinese party-state is fascist.

If we’re going to use nouns, we need to know what they actually mean. And we need to be aware of the tremendous impact and influence social media has, particularly on young people. Perhaps this is one reason Charlie Kirk reached out to this demographic. Because he knew that words can tip the scales and lead to violence when there are no alternatives to hatred.

I’ve watched many of the debates and speeches Charlie gave in the last year and a half. Like Charlie, I’m a believer in Jesus Christ and conservative in my world view. And like him, I don’t hate people who see things differently than I do. If I learned anything from listening to Charlie, it was the importance of hearing others and respecting their right to believe as they do and say what they want. As long as it does not lead to violence.

I’m afraid for our country. In addition to knowing first hand his family’s grief and the theft of his life, this is why I feel so distraught by Charlie’s assassination. If it happened to him, it could happen to anyone. It strikes at the heart of the American experiment. Between the Bill of Rights and the modifications that followed, there are twenty-seven amendments to our Constitution, and the first one, the premier right listed by the founders of this remarkable country, is the right to free speech and assembly.

Plenty of people have died in the last two hundred fifty years to protect that right.

And now there’s one more.

Word Play

And so our worst fears have already materialized. AI has crossed over from being useful to being a useful idiot.

I knew this would happen.

All I did was ask my phone a simple question. “When did Arizona begin calling dust storms haboobs”? I watched its little mind spin as it searched the universe for a specific date. That’s all I wanted. The answer to “when?”

I remember where I was when I first heard that the term “dust storm” wasn’t good enough for our weathermen anymore. I was visiting friends in Idaho the day someone first videotaped an impressive rolling wall of dirt, sand and dust as it swallowed Phoenix whole and then called it a haboob, whatever that was. But what year did that take place?

Either I speak with a lisp or I need to clean my iPhone’s ears out. The answer was curt.

Arizona did not start calling dust storms “her boobs;”
the term used is haboob.

 

Oh, for pity’s sake. Dust storms don’t even resemble boobs. Doesn’t my iPhone even know me? Why would I ever ask a stupid question like that? Instantly offended, I searched my screen for a place to respond. Of course, there wasn’t one. How clever of you, Artificial Intelligence, to protect yourself from correction. You can dish it out but you can’t take it.

I took a screen shot of my scolding and today I asked it the same question. Once again, AI researched what it heard instead of what I said. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to put a parental block on my own phone.

I did get the answer to my question, though. It was 2011 when our local meteorologists first latched onto the term. I remember seeing pictures of the massive storm on my friend’s computer way back then, mouth agape, asking, “What the heck is a haboob?”

Listen, I’ve lived in Arizona’s desert for more than forty-five years of my life. I’ve seen my fair share of summer dust storms. Maybe you’ve never experienced one, but they’re nasty. They trash swimming pools with silty soil and leaves and lawn furniture. They’re dangerous to drive in, especially on freeways, reducing visibility to zero. They cover everything in dirt and are rarely followed up with a good washdown from the very monsoon storms that cause them.

Like I said, nasty. And windy. But that’s all they are. They’re made up entirely of dust and wind and possibly small rodents. Thus the term, “dust storm.” Which, by the way, is the translation of the Arabic word haboob - Dust Storm.

Sigh. I know. I’m making a butte out of a knoll, or a mountain out of a mole hill. (Doesn’t really roll off the tongue the same way, does it?) I’m just saying—if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Here’s my real beef, besides the insertion of foreign phrases that do nothing to clear the air. The source of haboobs across the Sahara Desert are thunderstorm downdrafts. They occur when a collapsing storm creates a wall of airborne sediment miles long and thousands of feet high.

On the other hand, dust storms in Arizona are caused by thunderstorm downdrafts. They create a powerful outflow, lifting dusty silt and debris from the ground and forming a wall of airborne sediment that can be miles long and several thousand feet high.

Well, that certainly clears it up.

They’re the same thing.

I guess scientists wanted a new word to describe a really dramatic wall of dirt that looks more impressive than our ordinary run of the mill variety. So when in the 1970’s they noticed how our dusty summer monsoons resembled dust storms in Sudan, they imported their word for dust storm and substituted it for our word for dust storm. In 2011 the internet adopted the name permanently.

Genius.

The videos of the haboob we experienced here last week are definitely impressive. But I was home for this one and the only difference I saw between The Great Haboob of 2025 and every other dirt flurry I’ve already experienced in the desert this summer was more wind and the delight of seeing my patio chairs fly across the back porch.

Desert rats like me don’t get that excited by new terms for old storms. And, in my opinion, weathermen who think we do are ha-boobs. 

Mother Nature doesn't care what you call her little temper tantrum. Just remember to lock down your patio furniture and cover the pool before the next one hits.

Can you hear me now, AI? Put that in your hookah and vape it.

With thanks to Jasper Nance for allowing the use of the amazing photo seen above. The original can be viewed from this link: Haboob!! | Moments before impact 4x10mm image panorama | Jasper Nance | Flickr