I bought a load of logs the other day.
Jenny said that when they delivered it in the tandem dump truck that the ground shook when the driver dropped the load.
It is a big load o’ logs.
Not only is it a big load of logs, it’s also a load that has some really big logs in it. He must have had to kill a huge oak tree to bring me this giant pile of huge logs.
Now I’m “processing” this giant pile of wood….”processing” is a funny word…makes it sound so much more clinical than being out in the sunshine with a chainsaw and a gallon of bar oil really is….now I’m cutting up this big pile of logs so that I can split and stack and eventually, after it’s had the Summer and Fall to dry out, burn it up.
That’s kind of crazy, really. It’s necessary…we have a little Jotul stove and one of those big logs wouldn’t fit if I didn’t cut it up to make it smaller…but what other activity do we do that ends like that?
Most of what we do is done with the idea of a somewhat permanent and positive conclusion. We build a house so that we can live in it for a while…not so that we can burn it down when the appropriate season occurs.
We build our “nest” so that we…and any “little birds” that might find their way into it…can live in it. We build to live…not to burn.
But what happens when it’s time for the little birds to fly away? Then we realize that our nest was a place to live…and a place to launch.
It’s good that all this happens in real-time. If it was like one of those films we used to watch in school ( before video tapes…before DVD…before downloaded files on a laptop hooked up to a projector….you know….OLD SCHOOL)…like one of the films of the flower growing and opening up in a couple of minutes it wouldn’t be a good thing.
If we saw our lives and the lives of our children happening like that it would drive us crazy. I don’t think we’re designed to be able to see that far ahead…or understand what happened before so completely.
Being distracted can be sort of a gift sometimes. Life is designed to be lived every day…each and every single day… but it’s easy to get ahead of our selves. Planning too much can be a great distraction, sometimes…it’s the space between plans where the life happens.
A change is not an end…it’s just a change.
We process the wood so that we can burn the wood so that we can stay warm so that we can live to cut the wood another day.
That’s not a “Lion King” worthy circle of life…it’s a lot more simple than a cartoon movie deserves…but I think that everything we do really does have some kind of circular movement to it.
What’s the law of physics? ” For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”.
Well….
We burn the wood, we raise the children, healthy birds learn to fly…it’s all just stuff that happens around us in this life.
And that’s the way it is.
image from here.
