more normal than not

It is way too early in the morning.

I’m going to drink a lot of coffee, read some news I don’t need to know on the internet, and write my morning blog post.

I’m going to drink a lot of coffee and write a post about how we can’t slow down.

Oh…the hypocrisy of it all.

Or…even better….I’m going to drink a lot of coffee, write a blog post about how as a culture we can’t slow down…and listen to the George Winston channel on Pandora.com.

We live in confusing times.

I was listening to conservative talk radio while I was driving around for the USPS the other day, and the guy was talking about Beyonce’s performance at the halftime show of the latest Super Bowl.

Of course, he didn’t like it…too loud, too much flesh, too suggestive, etc.

I thought it was a pretty good performance….but my perspective may be off somehow.

Anyway…

He raised the observation that the performers at the original Super Bowl were a marching band.

That was a different time, for sure.

I doubt that we’d be able to sit through a marching band performance for a big game half-time show now.

Now we measure our dissatisfaction in numbers most of us don’t even understand. When we buy a computer, we know that the faster it is…the better it is….even though what we have may be perfectly fine for most human needs.

Human needs?  Basic human needs must include the ability to put our hands on a keyboard now.

Through the internet, I can know more about things I didn’t need to know anything about faster than ever before…and always feel like there may be something that I’m missing out on…”just give me a second…I know I can find it out there somewhere“.

They used to call the “slow food movement” a… dinner party.  Nobody had to be told to slow down and enjoy the experience.  There wasn’t any need to divert from the “hectic pace”…because we hadn’t learned to live like that yet.

People have always talked about the “rat race”…I remember wondering what that was when I was little…but I wonder if things haven’t accelerated some since I was younger.

I almost wrote “since I was young”….holy smokes.

There were things that were taken for granted as being the way it was always going to be.

We said the pledge at school, we held doors for each other, we didn’t feel bashful about wishing each other a Merry Christmas….we didn’t worry about where it was sanctioned that it was acceptable to pray.

Praying wasn’t a confrontational thing…it was just a conversation.

I’ve heard it said that time feels like it accelerates as we get older.

I can’t really tell if we cram more into a year and it feels like it goes by faster because of it…or that things have started spinning faster as I’ve “gotten up in years”.  It’s a gradual thing…if it happened all at once we could tell what was happening and maybe put on the brakes.

I told a friend once when we were talking about being married that it wasn’t really about doing everything right every time…that was kind of impossible to figure out how to do that…it was about being willing to try.

Maybe being willing is the best we can do as far as slowing down goes.

Another friend, a songwriter, has a lyric where he says “try to explain how a man holds a vigil, alone on a crowded street”.

I guess that all of us hold our own version of a vigil…whether we know it or not.

I think that acceleration is a given…things are going to move as fast as we allow them to…and probably faster than we understand.

Man…it took a lot longer to write this post than I expected. Now I’m behind on my “speed surfing”.

Just kidding…but kidding quickly.

 

A tree falling in the forest, one hand clapping, a bell ringing in an empty sky…all these zen descriptions of what might be effort that remains unknown.

How about something human scale like blowing a whistle in an empty field?

Blowing a whistle in an empty field…face turning red from the exertion, lungs burning, just this shy of passing out…and still blowing on…filling up the space with a sound no one will hear.

If you look up whistleblower, you’ll find out that it’s a pretty heavy term…bringing something to light that’s not right is a dangerous thing to do.

But what happens if your head is so full of paranoia and conspiracy that everything you see holds “something that’s not right”?

I remember the movie Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson…turned out to be a pretty straight ahead thriller by the time we got into the movie a ways…but early on it  was hilarious how deeply he was into every conspiracy under the sun.

It was hilarious in the movie.

I don’t know that I’m not just another noisy “whistleblower”…tweeting and tooting, wheezing and warbling ( I found a thesaurus) about all the other whistling fools out in the world…buying up cases of Windex so I can make sure that the walls of my glass castle gleam.

I’ve always believed that we find what we look for (see an earlier post called “what kind of people”)….so I guess it’s not hard to understand when bad luck and bad people seem to surround certain people.

Maybe it’s time to sit down for a minute…put the whistle away for a while…and catch our breaths.

The world’s a pretty good place still as far as I can tell.

I’m just sayin’.

 

I don’t always understand where kindness comes from.

I’ve seen it in action.  I understand it when I see it…but I don’t always comprehend what leads people to express it.

In some of the books I’ve read about the West, they talk about flash floods filling up an arroyo…a stream bed that’s usually empty of water.  It’s a surprise when a barren creek bed gets filled by something as unexpected in the desert as a lot of water coming fast.

Unexpected rain, coming hard and strong…droplets separate and distinct…join on dry ground to become, at least for a little while…until the next dry spell…a river that covers and carries.

In the moment, these separate acts of kindness mean a great deal.

Later, when we get see the big picture, they mean even more.

We get caught up in arguments about the correct way to baptize….” IMMERSION !!! SPRINKLE !! “…we argue back and forth…each supporting their views with scripture and well rehearsed theology.

I wonder if either one isn’t just a reminder of the deluge to come?

I wonder if, when we get to the end of our lives, God won’t be waiting for us to say, “you did pretty well…you really tried and really did do the best you could…but you know something?  I sent you to be a drop in a raging river and the best you could do was try and stay moist all by yourself on a hot sidewalk.  Now…it’s not your fault…you didn’t know any better…but don’t you think it would have been easier and more effective if you could have just loved everybody…and joined together to flow on and cover the world?”

Or something like that.  I really don’t know what God would say to any of us.

I guess some of us are willing to hold our hand out and say, “Feel the rain? Doesn’t it feel wonderful?”

Others just want to spray everyone down hard with a fire hose.

I guess it’s more appealing to be a powerful fire hose than it is to be a single drop among many.

There are a lot of thirsty people.  There are a lot of people who just need a drink of water…no theology, no preaching…just a drink of water.

God’s kindness is bigger than any “river” we could ever hope to understand.  It’s a quiet and constant collection of droplets getting ready to fill the “arroyo”.

Rain on.

 

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite writers.

My wife thought he was a major pervert for a long time…wouldn’t read him.

It was something about nearly every book having a character who was having an affair with a younger woman.

I mean…much younger…really young…like a teenager.

It was usually an older dude…a worn out character with a long and hard history…having a relationship with a young innocent.

That wasn’t an appealing subject to my wife.

Then she read “Dalva”…one of Jim Harrison’s books.

She commented that she wondered how he could write from a woman’s perspective like that.

She thinks he’s a pretty darn good (my words, not hers) writer now.

One of my favorite lines of his is from the end of a book called “Farmer”.

The main character has…surprise…had and pretty much finished an affair with a younger woman and has returned to his older “lady friend” who he had a relationship with before he veered off into his adventure with youth.

You get the feeling that this mature relationship is one he might stick with…maybe.  It’s all kind of indistinct.

Anyway…the last line in the book was, “She slows the horse by the grape arbor and he takes the halter and she smiles at him, the miniature violets on her cotton dress “

I love that.  No period at the end of the sentence…nothing really wrapped up…just sensory, just life washing over him.  I guess that’s what I love about Jim Harrison…he’s a pretty earthy guy…an outdoorsman and a gourmand…a hedonist.  He gives me the impression that he wakes up “eating life”…and doesn’t stop until he drops into sleep at the end of the day.  He’s a poet, too…so in addition to the animal side that he describes so well…there’s the internal part of us all being described like a poet would describe it…with grace and sensitivity.

There is value in these books.  Sure, there’s the nasty side occasionally …maybe like there’s something a little dark in the best of us…but I think that he balances it with enough beauty and nobility that on the whole it’s not hard to realize that something good may come of it all.

Jim Harrison wrote Legends of the Fall.  When I try to tell people who he is, that’s the book I use in my explanation.  Some of his other books have been made into films but that’s the best known of all of them.