Salmon & Asparagus

For dinner I baked salmon and steamed asparagus, not an unusual meal for me. Yet tonight, I placed dinner on my plate and felt so strange. I ate salmon and asparagus while neighbors just over two miles away are now living with relatives or are in shelters, from their homes they are displaced.

Then it occurs to me, I eat foods like these regularly while children across town go to bed hungry. Families here in Nashville were without homes and lived in shelters, cars or what use to be Tent City long before the rains. I eat salmon and asparagus regularly while children and their families around the world go to bed hungry and homeless.

This is so hard to wrap my mind around, the inequity. Why am I conscious in this way now and not previously? Because it is in my own backyard. Seeing my eighty-year-old friend loose her home's belongings due to seven foot high waters that came rushing through and hearing she lives with her son in a neighboring county, her son who told me Saturday of seeing several houses wash down the river near him...this makes it real. It is not on tv. It is in my face as I feed my face. Not because I am uncaring, but because I know I need to care for myself in order to care for others. Others whose stories somehow I believe will feed my heart as I in turn hope to feed the hearts of others.

-Dawn, 5/10/10

dawn@imaginetheshift.com