Instability

This month my mom was on her weekly raw milk foray when this happened: A kid ran into the milk house and yelled for everyone to get out, the silo was falling down.

Everyone ran out, and the silo fell down.

If it had tipped over onto the barn... well, it didn’t. It crumbled apart and fell in the other direction, leaving a $30,000 pile of silage, old cement and sparking power lines. Leaving a bunch of health nuts standing around rethinking the whole raw milk idea.



Weird that it happens during the one hour in a week when people stop by to pick up the milk. Weird that it happened at all. And another weird: My mom showed me the place in her Eckhart Tolle book where she’d stopped reading just before she went to get the milk.

All structures are unstable, it read.

Whhhhuuuuummmp.

That night my mom went to the funeral of a friend who’d been a year younger. She’d had cancer but recovered; it was a viral something or other in the end.



Friends in school and elsewhere have reported difficulties recently. Dealing with death, illness, money, home sales, moving. While working on a graduate degree. It’s the usual human stuff but it seems compounded of late; lots of people dealing with lots of things.

Uncertainty.

Silos. Bridges. Towers. The economy. The stock market. The workplace. Families. The human body.

Everything is off-kilter, and it’s seemed that way for a while now.