Marching toward Soylent Green and other such idyllic futures

It makes perfect sense. Right now, many things work together to cast a bleakness on the look of ordinary life. Maybe that is why as we walked through the exit doors of Walmart this morning, I reacted to your statement with genuine grief. The kind of grief you feel when a favorite pet dies; you know--the little creature who had the power to make even a dark day have its bright spot. For as we left, you pointed out a placard written in pure white lettering set on a non-confrontational blue background, and you commented on its content. "Oh, yeah. Did you hear? Walmart got rid of their layaway department."

I hugged my paltry bag full of things like hair color, contact lens cleaner and envelopes...those raw personal needs that take me to Walmart...and I felt myself deflate a little. You see, somewhere inside me, I've kept a ledger of the demise of things that I took for granted as free services afforded in our society over the years. Even in this capitalist country, there persisted an overlay of something softer than pure capitalism...but in the end, free layaway at Walmart seemed to stand alone, a last bastion of free service. But come December, no more layaway. I read somewhere that many of the big stores (I don't remember which ones specifically, but places like Sears, Target, etc.) now earn the bulk of their income off the credit card interest people pay for past purchases, while monies earned on current sales serve as secondary profits. I think it was Readers Digest that brought this to my attention, but the actual percentages were too depressing to commit to memory. I know they were enough to alarm the financial analysts who wrote the article.

So it feels like I take my children walking in the cemetery behind some old abandoned church, and I point to the tombstones, and we read them:

"This is the head stone of the one who pumped gas and checked your oil for free.
And this one, it is the doctor who made housecalls and understood that you might need to pay with a basket of eggs.
That whole hillside of graves over there...those are the housewives. They're the ones who did a myriad of jobs and could have garnered more respect for their work as care-givers, cooks, lawyers, nurses, psychologists, etc. by simply claiming each job title and attaching the words pro bono to the work, but they didn't think it necessary to draw attention to the obvious good of public service. They're probably spinning under there, appalled at the lack of weight and significance given to the label housewife in this present day."

And lifting out of my reverie, I hear you ponder as we cross the parking lot.
"I wonder what the kids will miss when they are grown? What's left for them to look back on as free services lost between their youth and their adulthood?" And I'm afraid to wonder that with you.

The libraries? The public schools? Or will it be less cultural, more in the nature of primal need. A plot of grass outside the door? Running water? Part and parcel from the Bill of Rights? Or will it be the whole shebang, those things our forefathers considered "self-evident?"

If the deepest quality of this life is tied to our willingness to embrace gratitude in all circumstances, then we must dig deep. Gratitude is all relative. I remember once we laughed because several in the family were in "dire" enough physical condition that we realized we were having to reach deep to find things with which to console ourselves, thoughts like, "At least we're not battling ebola or the black plague." We found our well of gratitude.

Now we're becoming aware of the same negative imbalance in our social, national, economic world. So we, ever the ones to look for that thing to appreciate, we step out and say like the Puritan who bowed his head over his bread and water: "All this and Christ, too." And somewhere, God in His infinite eternal book of accounts notes our recognition of this seemingly low ceiling and reminds us of other people in other times and places who felt equally powerless to keep a grasp on things. He reminds us that some times and places are given the power to show why hyper-control by even a benign authority runs amok. These are the ones given the assignment of living in the days when the veil of deception is lifted and good is revealed to be good, and bad to be bad. To play a part in that scenario carries a profound dignity, but also a great strain in the days of its occurring.

So above all else, we discover we can thank God for this infinite spiritual freedom, even as what seems to shackle our hands and feet rattles merrily away while we sing and encourage each other, unnoticed, seemingly passive and obviously frail in a dark dungeon...for now. (smile)

Dewey's visit to the International Arts Festival

We have a project this weekend. Dewey came home from school with Nolan, the Kindergartener. Dewey is a class bear that "visits" each child. We were fortunate enough to get him for a whole weekend. Now Dewey comes with an old-styled black and white composition notebook, his diary of his travels if you will. I wonder how we will translate this evening into Kindergartenese for Dewey's journal?

It all began when we took the 5th grader to a friend's house for a camp-out. Dewey came along for the ride. After dropping off the camper, we stopped by the grocery store. That was when we noticed things turning strange. Nolan, Dewey and I remained in the van as Scott ran in for a few things we needed for supper. When he returned, he commented. "There's going ot be a blizzard. Or at least people are shopping like one's coming...huge loads of food rolling down the checkouts." We shrugged it off, not realizing they knew more than we did about what had happened since we drove across the city to drop off the camper. Our town had subsequently closed, and we never saw it coming.

As we continued down the road, we hardly cast a glance at the traffic cops at first. Lately, every other street corner has a new townhousing complex or a trendy artsy strip-mall under construction. (We're trying as a community to become known as the arts and design district for the north side of the city. A wealthy suburb like ours has delusions of "arts patronage" grandeur in its bloodline, I guess.) In any case, at first the flashing lights and traffic cop did not alarm us. But as we took the first side jaunt, we realized that these detours were now in layers, like an onion. First, there were the basic construction detours that we'd learned to maneuver from days gone by. But layered over this today were the detours prompted by the International Arts Festival street closures. It will be going on all weekend. Never mind that road work and torn up parking lots make parking a nightmare, and never mind that there is a home football game going on tonight that will draw away potential festival attenders, and just ignore that electrical storm with high winds that is already invading town. We WILL patronize the arts because that is what cultured people do! (Nouveau riche, I'd say, if I weren't a bumpkin myself and therefore outside both arenas: the one for preeners and the one for snubbers.) Finally, after several false turns we got hopelessly lost in a residential community.

I made the comment to Scott. "You know this is one of those good ideas gone bad because it was too narrow-minded. The idea was to make these cul-de-sac, no-through-way communities as a way to keep the children safe. In these places, they aren't supposed to be run down by the people who simply want a quick cut through. But when the through-ways are all closed down, you get trapped in these things..."

"...and then you get mad and drive too fast and run the kids down anyway," he said.

Eventually, we found a route that gave us a chance to ask a cop, "How do we get home if we live back there?"
He referenced a road that was the one route he thought still open.
"Nope, the ones doing construction closed that one," we said. He being a festival traffic cop instead of a construction traffic cop told us, "I don't know then. Ask a city cop."

Finally, we found an open road that led home, but because people had decided to park on this road, it was now, in effect, a one way route on which thousands hoped to venture around the festival closures or else to park. When we managed to navigate to our own driveway, we breathed a sigh of relief and then set ourselves up to watch the show: the line of frustrated drivers taking their cars hopefully down and then angrily back up the cul-de-sac road that passed in front of our own house. Rats after cheese, Scott decided. "You know, we could probably make some money if we set up a stand that sells maps showing how to get away from here," he said.

And we salved our bitter nerves with wry comments like:

"I know what the International in the naming of this festival is all about, it describes how far you have to go to find the end of the detour around the festival."
"...or describes the trafffic patterns being used, like ones commonly found in places like Mexico City."

Rain dropped by the bucketful on the back deck, and lightning struck. We couldn't help but laugh. You'd have to know the history of the snobbery that drives a lot of community projects around here to truly appreciate how nakedly ironic is the failure of this festival.

"I can't tell you how much I hope it's still raining tomorrow morning," Scott said, envisioning trying to leave the house on day two of this entrapment in order to take the Kindergartener to play soccer. Dewey will be disappointed if he misses watching Nolan play the game, but I expect we can find some other way to entertain him...until the "blizzard" passes.

Christ's Climbing Companions

Twice we've caught pictures of our son in precarious places, high atop the monkey bars. Now we, too, are in such a spot for the second time, hanging in midair, looking for the most appropriate foothold. The first time we were positioned to learn something. But now, we seem positioned to demonstrate that we learned it, which makes such a difference in the peace factor this time around!

We have made great strides these last three years in knowing the heart of God, but "knowledge makes no difference in a life unless it is lived out" says my Bible's footnotes. King David knew the Lord intimately...after all he wrote the Psalms...but he also lived out that knowledge through many actual trials. So we, too, shall stand in a blowing place not unlike a desert, standing under the glaring, unfamiliar brightness of primal light, the light that was first of all creation, the light that came before sun and stars, before land and sea...stand there at the place of the beginning and offer ourselves as part of the end. This is the place and the position of reality for us. I found a nice, sane, succinct devotional about this difference between actuality and reality...which is something I think we've brought to light a lot in this blog. Here it is:

By actual we mean the things we come in contact with by our senses, and by real, that which lies behind, those things we cannot get at by our senses. The fanatic sees the real only and ignores the actual; the materialist looks at the actual only and ignores the real. The only sane being who ever trod this earth was Jesus Christ because in Him the actual and the real were one. Jesus Christ does not stand first in the actual world, He stands first in the real world; that is why the "natural man" does not bother his head about Him--"the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him." When we are born from above we begin to see the actual things in the light of the real. We say that prayer alters things, but prayer does not alter actual things nearly so much as it alters the person who sees the actual things. In the Sermon on the Mount the Lord brings the actual and the real together.
Daily Thoughts for Disciples, by Oswald Chambers

The Sermon on the Mount happened after the people had literally climbed "the Mount" with Jesus. No easy, broad grassy plain ministrations given there. Or in today's language, no comfy-chair-while-holding-a-latte-from-the-youth-group's-coffee-cart service there.

We've taken the red pill, as Morpheus would say, and accepted the actualities that come with our awareness of our God-given reality. And so we find the deepest sort of peace available to man. Therefore, it shouldn't surprise me, even though it does, how easy it has become to live out this verse that always before I looked at it with such dread:
"We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed but not in despair." 2 Corinthians 4:8

Nearly Robin Hood...

...except that you didn't rob from the rich, you just had to exercise your ingenuity to retrieve their cast-offs in a most fitting fashion. In so doing, you made my work life so very lovely this week. For I am indeed back at work, well into another school year. And while you lick your finger and lift it to test the winds of change over your own career-future, you're nevertheless flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone, bonded to me such that it shows up in all places. This week was a prime example of how your desire to care for the underprivileged can be met through my own work contacts.




You heard me on the phone with parent after parent, discussing the ramifications of becoming a newbie band student. But then you heard the heart-breaker call. On the road, you would never have been able to do what you did for that mother and child.

A mother who works hard long hours, whose heart is pure and graceful, but who has very little in the way of monetary gifts.
A daughter who was excited, hopeful to be in the band, just like many of her classmates.

The little girl signed her name on the class list, requesting I make a call to her home. But when I made that call I learned this mom had finally told her little one no, because these instruments don't come cheap.

That was a few days ago. Then yesterday, when I came home from school, you looked at me with a gleam in your eye. "Did you see what I got?" you asked. Taking me into the living room, you opened the case to a clarinet, the very instrument the little girl hoped to play.

You were appalled that life should deny opportunity to a child who wanted to learn to make music, so you took it upon yourself to go to the nearby wealthy high school where our own son is a senior band student, indeed with dreams of becoming a third-generation music educator. You went there and chatted with the directors about the program I started last year...a toddler band program at best, housed at what has been touted in strangely glowing terms as a "hippy Christian school" with no budget and no reserve of instruments. You presented a need that might look ridiculous to those who worked in that lavish band wing: a myriad of practice rooms, rehearsal halls, offices; all bustling with hundreds of well-supplied youths and resident band directors. Still you stood there and told them about the little girl who would not be playing.

In fact, you spoke with such eloquence that the director took you back to a storage closet full of instruments. These orphaned instruments had not belonged to people with lives like that of the little girl. These people are nonchalant with material goods, so nonchalant that when their youngsters decide they are finished with band, the instruments are simply left behind. Neither they nor their parents see it as a grievous loss to have that investment abandoned.

So the director gave you one of the clarinets, free of charge. God is indeed good to orphans and widows, for He provided the tools for this child's dream to come true free of charge, I'd almost say miraculously although it depended on your willingness to be used. (Well, OK, she'll have to pay a buck for a reed and $10 for the method book, but that's considerably less than the $600 that this clarinet was worth in 1999, or so the sticker on it says.) The mom's response revealed her familiarity with the intimate care of God when I called to tell her of the musical "windfall" available to her, for she commented: "No...You're joking? Well, it's just God getting the job done."

How cool that we were part of it, got to see be involved in the whole process, from receiving the embarrassingly personal details of the need to receiving the idea for the solution: and then what's more, getting to be the hands that delivered the goods! How incredible is that!

In fact, I'm going to say it again, I think you are called to be some kind of channel for the reappropriation of justice according to some divine directive. And, what an exciting thing it is for me to have the privilege of participation in it with you.

Evolution of Traffic, Part II

Another generation took to the road
a couple of years ago.
Soon he'll drive away less often,
Because soon he'll be here less often.
The many college contacts filling the nooks and crannies of life prompt me to wonder:
What do I tell him--before he's just a set of tail lights--about the best ways to drive?
Really drive.
What do I say, looking back
At my first poem on the evolution
of traffic?
Is there hope even yet to pass on to one who has years of driving ahead of him?

Yes there is!
I found it this way:

I sat at a stoplight.
Only this time,
in the early morning drizzle,
I was waiting to turn right
instead of left.

Green lights, yellow, red
directed traffic across my path.
I waited...not so much from obedience this time,
It was early.
I was sleepy, is all.
Then the left-turn lane beside me
Did its business by the law of the light.
Left arrows red, green, and yellow...
Still I waited, until it hit me: this was all there was.
Straight was not an option,
And my right turnhad no arrows:
It existed completely outside the light system.
I went when I thought I should.
So I did...but much later than I needed to.
So deeply ingrained was my conditioning
to lights.

So here, I think,
Is my best advice:
Want freedom?
Want to live outside the world of governed stop's and go's?
A yielded heart is all you need.
...
"Or to go around the world to the right."
(The practical, quirky dry perspective, as given by my husband, who although he's not here right now, is ever chiming around in my head.
Recognize him?)

Long Live King Hezekiah!

When I confessed my envy of your long-standing active friendships, my love, you countered my blog with your own confession of your own great envy of me: my long-standing active relationship with God. You used words like genuine, dynamic, interactive, meaningful both directions...and you made me cry. I cried because these words--when I received them from a witness--made these truths truer. I'd be too afraid I was becoming proud if I allowed myself to perceive things this special from God Himself about my relationship with Him, but because He used you to convey the message, it became another thing entirely for me to accept the words. You were the voice of God giving me hope and comfort. I didn't conjure up what God said to me through you, so thank you for being willing to give me this gift, especially since you felt like you were giving it from a position of lack on your own part.

Now here is God's answer, I think, to this ache you admitted for a more interactive, dynamic, genuine, meaningful both directions relationship for yourself and Him, as well as the answer to another ache you've felt, about your own mortality. He just this morning gave me understanding of that strange night when time went backwards for you. Again it is one of those how-did-I-not-see-this-meaning-before things. If you remember you woke to go to the bathroom and get a drink in the night, looked at the clock, came back to bed and slept. Later when you woke again and glanced at the clock, it was an earlier time than it had been the first time you got up! You swore you'd been awake; it wasn't a dream, etc. We packed it into the box of mysterious night activity we've both been having for the last year or two and left it there. Since then, many things have happened...you've had dreams of impending change, gone through a massive spiritual testing time, now been driven into a state of involuntary unsureness, and through it all you've have a nagging suspicion that death might wait for you the minute you finish everything assigned to this particular venture God has laid at our feet.

The time moving backward event answers your question of just how "impending" is death for you. In Scripture, King Hezekiah was given the word by the Prophet Isaiah that he would die. He sought the Lord to change that. God agreed to add to Hezekiah's days, and the sign that He gave of His agreement to this was that the sundial would move backward 10 degrees.

Now we could do the math and see how many "minutes" that backward movement translates to be, and I could dig back in my journal to find the exact times you said the clock showed, for you exactly remembered these...another pertinent thing, and I expect we'd find the times match up. But I hardly think it necessary to look for such proof, not at this point in our faith-walk with God, it would only be wasting time, for the message is still the same: years have been added to your life. God said so, in a way so intimately associated with Him as to leave no doubt about it. God bless all those years, my love! Starting today!

Being your Barnabas again...regarding change

I'm thinking back over your musings, my love, about God running you on a treadmill of perpetual change. You're right in one respect...the circumstances of life have not afforded you much continuity. I know you worry about how you now pull us in tow with you as you navigate change after change. But I also look at what your friend writes to you in response to your latest blog on this topic...how those words along with his request that you officiate his wedding are evidence of what you have as a counterbalance to all the change in your circumstances.

Your life also has its areas of profound continuity: in the world of your relationships. Even where there was one great breach--with your firstborn, you are making headway toward repair. And in many places, minor breaches have not changed your relationships at all...no matter how much "life" tries to take this gift of relationship continuity away from you, your foundation remains unmoved.

It may not be a thing you notice, because it is so much a part of your life and alway has been; but I notice it. I could spend the rest of this blog becoming self-pitying, making a teeth-gritting dissection of my own numerous losses in this area, but I'll try to keep it illustratively brief. You see, I am the living antithesis of this gift of yours. Whereas your mother calls every week on Saturday morning, my dad doesn't even remember my birthday half the time; and this not due to lack of love, but simply due to his temperment.

But moving outside the example of family, look at my history of ongoing contact with friends from my youth. While your childhood friends are a palpable presence in your life, my two friends that I'd say really cared about me as something other than a commodity, these two are completely lost to me. One became a farm-wife without ever going to college. When I visited her some 10 years after high school, she was tired and bitter, and I--even in my position as a divorcee with all the failure that broadcasts--represented the life she'd skipped, to her deep and hopeless regret--so I was literally painful for her to see.

And then there is my dearest friend, Francie: she who is ever lost to me. Absorbed into a cult. You know how she wrote me off entirely when I didn't embrace her elitist religion. The one time you actually met her she had her newborn baby with her. She was so surprised that I knew the scriptural reference she used in naming her child. She assumed it to be far too obscure a reference for someone on the "outside" like me to catch. But the name Caleb is not that obscure a reference in my opinion. To me, the only obscurity was in her new perception of me. She was just so sure that I'd never have the understanding to relate to her now that she was so much more knowledgeable in the Way. That was what...8 years ago? Not a word since; not even when I contacted her mom and said I'd love to hear from her.

You're right, I could contact my old boyfriend...he'd love to hear from me. In fact, a couple of years ago when I ran into him in Carbondale with my sister, he made the comment to me, "Don't stay away so long!" But his common-law wife is not even comfortable with the fact that he is still close friends with my sister (who he considers like his own little sister) so how would she handle me showing up saying, "Gee, I miss contact with my old friends."

Besides, even if I repaired all the breaches, it would be too late for what I'm talking about here. The continuity for me has been broken on every line. "Catching up" could happen, but the presumed conclusion to that catching up would be more long years of silence. A sudden resurgence of involvement would be unlikely.

As for my adult life, many friends have popped up over the years who quickly grow to be very close and even somewhat reliant on my heart and soul and mind and who offer me a similar support; but only for a brief season, never in that way that walks through the years and abides.

Brief seasons of companionship have always been the norm for me. Only you and God have afforded me continuing interest...which, as an aside, I think may be part of why I may have seemed to recoil at the idea of you being heavily involved in daily life again, because it broke the mold. I feel quite normal running a script where people appear in my life with overpowering presence, but prove transient, disappearing before I lose my subtle "essence" to their more pungent ones. By having the strong personality you have and then taking jobs that always kept you at a distance, you artfully ran the script I know so well, but now you are changing the last act, which simply means that it is time for me to grow, too. Time for me to say I won't be lost in your shadow. How do I make you understand this? You have a strong personality; one that is not overcome by others--the closest you could come to understanding this, I'd expect is your relativity through your relationship with your ex-wife, through and after that marriage. Imagine that type of "surprise capture, bondage and escape" being a common life-theme, and you'll see a little deeper into my relationship history. You'll see why I look for continuity in things like land and heirlooms, seeing the same tree and flower bed every year instead of longing for the continuity you have: by seeing the same people. But still, your talk of "coming home again for good" makes me think of these things...makes me face my weakness, so I thank you for that. But it all leads back to the idea of this gift I want to remind you is yours...like the last one hidden under the back branches of the Christmas tree, almost forgotten. Here it is:

Imagine if your friends had gone the way mine did. Imagine if your parents really didn't call every Saturday, but only quarterly, and generally only if you called first and left a message saying please call. (smile) This is a tremendous gift you have been given: John, Doug, Robert, Tad...all of them more than memories...all of them living lives full of contemporary details that you know, despite the fact that you don't haunt the same neighborhoods anymore. All of them people who didn't have to stay in touch just due to blood connection. Their continuing contact makes them a true testament to the value of simply knowing you.

To me, that is one of the best examples of changelessness that a person can receive in this lifetime. It is a gift from God. So I'd say don't be afraid of the changes that do come and don't be discouraged, just pull out that treasure box of attentive friends and family and be consoled by their abiding presence; then you can tell me to get over my maudlin self, and we can start shopping for something to replace your company cell phone.

Contrapuntal themes

Lately you've dreamed of airplanes,
Lately I've dreamed of flies...
Today, I came across this little set of instructions for a kit that involves both our dream obsessions in a joint project. Check it out:


If it doesn't blow up enough to read, it is about taking flies, numbing them in a freezer and then pasting them to a matchstick airplane, as you breathe warm air on them, they come alive again and "Start the plane. If you did things correctly, it will fly! Sit back and enjoy the happy flies playing with the plane! None of them will have experienced anything like this before! ENJOY!"

Too funny!

Here I am again....

Hola, old friend...it's been a while, huh? I really don't remember the last time I had (found) the time to blog. As I had stated somewhere in the relatively short history of this blog, writing is something you do because you want to...putting finger-pads to keys seems for me to be something I would like to do more, but it's just "too darn hard"....thank God I don't have a daily column to write...I have heard that writing a daily colum is like being married to a nymphomaniac....really fun for a few weeks, but ultimately the pressure to preform gets to be a burden....

Once again, I find myself in front of the computer at some ungodly early morning hour, the sounds of the trucks on the interstate droning on and on...tires circling in a never ending loop. I am only 42 years old, and really much too young to be having insomnia problems. I am a firm believer in bio-rhythms, and mine are on Guam time, evidently.

I am home, and that is something (actually a big something), and I know that when I finish this, I will climb back into bed with my wonderful wife, trying not to wake her, and spend some time writing songs to the rhythm of her heartbeat. I look forward to being able to do that every night.....

The job front is in the air for now...I keep getting the feeling that, want it or not, change is going to happen soon. I make more than anyone at my job "level", and seem to be the tallest tree in the forest, an easy target for any budget trimming that my clueless (sorry, just how I feel) president decides to impose. He has proven himself to be a myopic, bottom line kind of boss, one that I don't have confidence in that he will see beyond a few dollars saved by cutting my salary (never mind that we just finished spending 1000 dollars flying one of our trainers to SLC for 20...TWENTY...minutes of training...the same trainer that lives 45 miles from both myself and Tierry G....sigh.....). Yes, I am looking for something that will keep me home more, so my worry might just be that I will be beaten to the punch (kinda like when your girlfriend breaks up with you the day before you were going to end it....same result, but not the way you wanted it). I am really putting some time into prayer for help discerning the right path...not for a job, or money, or anything...just guidance....

...can you blog a prayer?

Labor Day...

...and all my poor husband is laboring with is a horrific migraine headache. So what do I do to keep from worrying about him? (We once had to go to the emergency room with one of these things, but I know that right now he wouldn't permit such an expensive jaunt, especially with a costly hernia surgery appearing to loom on the horizon for our five-year-old.) What do I do when I'm not checking his temperature and pulse? I sit outside and draw a tree, something I haven't done in years. It was going pretty well until the five-year-old came out and asked me to draw the dog just beyond the fence, also in the scene. My artist's eye is far too rusty to make much of a dog on paper, but I tried. Drawing was soothing and a flashback to my younger days...as was my follow-up activity to the sketching: I came inside and watched An American in Paris.

Funny what watching a musical from the early 50's does to someone like me. I felt so achingly nostalgic for the simplicity of it: for the days when the label "avante garde" could be carried by something like the musical ballet sequence in this movie rather than requiring a further reach say toward a jar of urine and a crucifix. I ache for the way the dance sequence impressed the innocence of my childhood when I watched this movie with my parents, themselves avid fans of the golden age of the Hollywood musical. But at the same time, I see with new eyes--eyes a little misty from a tear or two--how well the dance that Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron do in the fountain on Concorde Square (I think that is the fountain it is to represent) portrays intimate love between a man and a woman...something my child-eyes did not see as I sat on my parents living room floor and imagined myself as the dancer.

I ache in a way that seems to disconnect me from the world of today even as it reminds me that the world I "feel" at that moment is, after all, the one that is forever gone. It is something I wrote about once before, after driving through a little town that appeared still locked in an earlier time. I said seeing such a town was a trigger that opened a doorway to a mystical place. Today such a trigger took me again, the door opened through this movie as it followed that visit to my own quieter past days: days of sitting and drawing as I stare at a tree.

I've been thinking about this doorway and I've found that it does not appear to you until you have lived through a few life-eras. First, there is the one of being sure that the generation older than you have all the secrets to "what is cool." Next comes the era of presuming you and your own generation have all the secrets to genuine coolness (later known as pretension), you have this coolness (--or to avoid making my own point, should I say phat-ness, or is that passe now too?) In any case, you are sure you have these pretensions formed with more original flare than any other generation ever has had or will have. Finally, you are on the verge of the doorway when you make the shocking discovery that the next generation is of the same opinion about themselves that you were about yourself. This is a thing you never considered possible! You were sure the generation following yours would automatically respect the wonder of your ultimate pretension. And now, because they don't feel this way at all, their pretension looks utterly stupid to you. The thing is, they don't care. In fact, your "stuffy" attitude in disrespecting their originality only supports that "new cool" self-perception they have of themselves; so finally you sigh and rub an aching place...any aching place will do...and say, like Old King Solomon: "So, all is vanity under the sun. I get it now."

But then you look to the generation before yours and see them wink at you as if you have made some new rite of passage. It is as if they are congratulating you for coming to see that you live that ancient wisdom: you are part of a human progression that has gone along this very route for generations. At the moment of that wink, you recapture something a little higher than what you've been feeling, which would be pride after its fall from lofty heights, now squashed flat into a steamy heap of depression on the sidewalk but not quite dead, an occasional flutter of self-pity and melodrama can be found at the pulse points--until that wink; then all that is left that needs to die does die, and you find your sheepish humility regarding your own pertinence. The benefit of all this is that you regain some hope for the next generation, knowing someday you'll be able to give them a similar winking lift back into genuine pertinence.

...It is then that you can go to this magical timeless place...timeless because its existence doesn't depend on reality, only on your perceptive memory. And magical, well magical for the same reasons. You know it as the place where you still believe, stil hope all the things the young ones still blindly believe and hope about themselves, but now you believe these things without pride and disunity toward other generations, rather you believe in oneness with them.

But now, my love, you come stumbling out from your state of feverish sleep to a state of feverish waking, so I'll come back to reality and be with you. The one drawback of the magical world: you can't do anyone there any good, the most you can do to honor all those there is to bring their magic that swells your spirit into the world of the real and the do something good for someone.

More trees felled...

Like a rhythm, like a heartbeat--holy communion visits me through thematic repetition again today. As an end cap to my youngest son's discovery of the debate over whether falling trees make sound without listening ears to hear them comes this: a quote I read tonight in a book by Henri Nouwen called Life of the Beloved.

In this book, Nouwen--an aged Catholic priest who taught at Notre Dame, Harvard and Yale; a man considered by many to be an outstanding spiritual writer--is petitioned by Fred Bratman--a young journalist, a secular Jew settled in the heart of the secular world: New York City--to write a book intentioned for people like him, rather than one for the people who "least need to hear it."

Fred said, "Speak to us about the deepest yearning of our hearts, about our many wishes, about our hope; not about the many strategies for survival, but about trust; not about new methods of satisfying our emotional needs, but about love. Speak to us about a vision larger than our changing perspectives and about a voice deeper than the clamorings of our mass media. Yes, speak to us about something or someone greater than ourselves. Speak to us about...God."

And when Nouwen made an abashed comment that his voice was not the one to speak to such things, Fred said: "You can do it...You have to do it...If you don't, who will?...Visit me more often; talk to my friends; look attentively at what you see, and listen carefully to what you hear. You will discover a cry welling up from the depths of the human heart that has remained unheard because there was no one to listen."
What was that last bit again?

You will discover a cry welling up from the depths of the human heart that has remained unheard because there was no one to listen.
Trees are falling. Who can hear?


I think of the things You've been pouring into my life lately, God, and I catch Your voice floating on the wind--with a strange mix of a chuckle for some and a sigh for others--as You say: "Let's just see who's not listening now..."

"If a Tree Falls in a Forest...

and no one is there to hear it, does it really make a sound?"

My youngest just became acquainted with this old adage while he was eating waffles and watching cartoons this morning. He was quite disgruntled with what he perceive as a lack of cleverness in that cartoon. His response to the question: "That's too easy! Of course, the answer is yes. It's just too easy."

Leave it to a child to accept--or even allow--that the laws of physics and acoustics do not hang on him as the giver of relativity. Do sound waves travel whether my ears are positioned to receive them? So what changes in us, changes so much that this adage became one universally known? Is it faith? Humility?

Whatever it is, somewhere between 5 and 50 we grow "wise" and "understand" this joke; we lose the ability to say such a resounding (pardon the pun) "of course it makes a sound!"