the sound of the ocean at night

At last, the rain. Tavi woke me in the night . She cries out sudden--sharp and short, as if she were having a bad dream. The rain thrummed hard on the roof, and a block away the ocean was roaring. I try to imagine what the ocean looks like when it's that loud, but it only seems to happen after dark. Images of white-capped waves yawning open above deep trenches, crashing, forming and reforming, all under low clouds thundering down rain. And yet it's just a common little storm. Not a hurricane, not a cyclone, not even a water funnel.

In the dark I have to acclimate to the sound, to understand, as I lay half asleep, that the waves will not rise up above the cliff and push inexorably forward, wasting the brittle homes before it like so many pick up sticks. The water won't push against the wall next to the bed until the window buckles and the wall breaks in. We are safe.

And yet there are fisherman out in small boats working to catch enough to feed their families, fighting this very moment to stay alive in raging seas. And there are those desparate to make it to a new shore, like the Senagalese migrants who were carried from Cape Verde to Barbados, in three months of water turned to leather, bone, and dust.

We are safe. Or is it just a habit of mind we can't quit? Our financial markets are deeply broken, as are the economies of almost every other country. We are experiencing a national brain drain as people leave the country. We lost nearly 600,000 jobs in January alone. California is mandating furloughs for government employees that will reduce their wages by 10%. And even though we finally had a rain, we're experiencing a major drought. Education somehow continues to be cut. Home prices continue to fall, new building is drying up. A list would fill a book. And yet the idea of safety is so very firmly ingrained that it's hard to change, even a little bit.

But we must. Our idea of safety is a dangerous illusion. That sounds a bit like the writing of a paranoid crank--one of those guys with an unkempt beard and a twitching brow that lurk in public libraries.

I expect things will get better. The question is how long will it take, and how low will we go? Right now there's a massive chunk of work to be done, and it requires fundamental shifts in perception and action that just won't happen until we're forced by circumstance to shift our eyes away from our amusements and begin to act as if we were all in this together.