Lean Not On Your Own Understanding

What to do when the list is longer than the day?

When the dream is bigger than the reality?

When the hope loses wind before it can even breath?

Now it sounds pretty down and one knows the task is owning the time.

We can scarcely just be, else we talk about it, which is doing.

How does one shut off the mind?

How does one "lean not on my own understanding?"

It is a letting go, a living into the questions, even a remembering

that the effort to understand may be another enemy in disguise.

God understands and He holds me in His hands.

If that is true, maybe the small sign on the refrigerator says it all:

"If you listen closely you can hear an angel whisper, 

'God is taking care of everything.'"

I believe, I stop, and in a minute I will go, trusting, being, doing.

"Lean not on your own understanding."

Tinker Creek: What to Make of all this Life?

I've been writing this year about Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the 1975 Pulitzer Prize Winner about life on a Creek in Roanoke. It's a tall order – not the book, but the writing about it.

All stories share in one another and this one more so than most. The author, Annie Dillard, sees the story of life right up "on the nose" one might say. She sees things most of us never think about or read about, nor would we ever imagine seeing them.

She speaks of “the mantis's abdomen dribbling out eggs in wet bubbles like tapioca pudding glued to a thorn.” See, I told you. No one sees this stuff. She tells of termites licking eggs to keep them from molding, of various insects producing countless eggs and eating them almost as fast as produced.

In her observation she tells us things beyond imagination. The microscopic root hairs of a rye plant within a single cubic inch of soil measure 6,000 miles.

Six thousand miles.

A lone aphid, breeding for a year could produce so many .10-inch long offspring they would stretch for 25 million light years.

One lightyear is 6 trillion miles.

We can be sure she didn't observe these infinite aphids, but her vast knowledge of such vast things relied on the work of scholars like Edwin Way Teale and his book, The Strange Lives of Familiar Insects. This book, says Annie, “I couldn't live without.”

The chapter for all of this Annie calls “Fecundity.” This word was new to me but I gathered its meaning soon enough, something like this: life and the making of it, the good, the bad, the ugly, the mind-boggling abundance. This fecundity, for example, means those who provide goldfish for the retail market, “Produce, measure, and sell our product by the ton.”

Tons of gold fish in everyday business? A cubic inch of root hairs measuring 6,000 miles? Aphids stretching a distance our mind can't imagine? Fecundity.

But Annie asks the questions observation brings forth. Why all this life in immediate proximity to death? Is my life worth more than the trillion aphids or barnacles or root hairs? How could breeding be such a mix of “utter spirituality and utter degradation?” And why does evolution breed death at colossal scale?

The finesse of her answers is brilliant, not least for the fact she doesn't belabor them. Annie asks if individual human life matters more, hints “yes,” and gives clue to the conundrum of death like this: “If you want to live you have to die.” Life is worth it, fecundity seems to say, in ways beyond comprehension. But death is ever there and we best make peace with that.

If you know the book you know the truth: just read it for yourself and find more, far more, than this review reveals. But if you read it you will know there is an unspoken answer in all of it, without evangelistic zeal. Such zeal would be redundant.

All stories share common ground and this could never be more true than when writing a story about the 'ground' as Annie has done. It is the ground of life and the ground of death. Grounding if you will. And I couldn't help see the story of Job, that timeless true drama in the Old Testament.

Citing Job here is no religious overlay. Job is a font of deepest wisdom, and Annie's story participates in it. It is the story of abundant life and abundant death, in Job's case real live people of his own loins. They all died at the hands of “nature and nature's God” and one wonders how on earth fecundity can be wedded to death and dearth and sorrow and loss.

Annie's answer was much like Job's. “That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation.” We could conceive it differently, but our “plan would never get off the drawing board.” She knows “this is the way the world is. And rage and shock at the pain and death...is the old, old mystery, as old as man, and completely unanswerable.”

Unanswerable. That was Job's conclusion in the face of God and while Annie says it far better than I convey, she lands in the same place. Life is marked by conundrum, and much of our natural emotions boil down to mere squeamishness. Returning to the Creek helps restore sanity and lets us know there must be something beyond that makes sense of it all. And if not, what were we going to do about it anyway?

Learning to Write

"Write, write, write," said Twain, advice on how to learn the craft. One wonders what matters in this thing, how readers are captured, or not. Is writing for the writer most of all? Perhaps.

Bacon, I think it was, said writing makes an exact man. Often when I hear a public commentator who seems especially articulate in a given subject I learn she gained that facility through writing a book. Immerse yourself in material for the length of a book and you will speak it well.

What of stream of consciousness, the sort of speaking on page thought after thought? Is there a place for this? Teachers call it free writing and it helps a writer get it down so he has something to work with. One of my better-ever pieces was more or less free writing, edited after the fact of course.

One can enjoy success with pieces written in a flash of insight. Similar to what another teacher taught: take that central insight, jot down several related ideas and segues, and put the thing together.

Learning to write means finding your voice and your most natural structure. Inspiration -- whatever that is -- helps, but as in all of life I am learning that 1) if you wait for inspiration your output will never be what it could be, and 2) working without inspiration leads to surprising quantity and the inspiration often comes in the plowing through.

I'm still learning this thing. Writing with little "want-to" is hard but I am slowly gaining that basic discipline. Toiling with an idea until I can say it well is no easy task for this impatient man. But I love the journey and someday I will write a book, if God is willing and I live long enough.

"God willing." 

I am learning to love that happy prayer in writing and in all of life. He does all things well.

Summers Die [100WW]

This year I heard the beautiful song from Les Miserables, “Bring Him Home.” Valjean pleads with God to spare his daughter's boyfriend who is determined to fight for revolution. Tune and lyric blend to perfection. My favorite line: “summers die one by one, how soon they fly on and on.”

Summers die – exactly true to life. Our Alaska summer is ebbing. Today, one of the last glorious days saw the sun still high in a clear sky. But summer will soon slip away, autumn will enter for a moment, and the long onset of winter's longer stay will be here.

Turned Again [10'TU]

 When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. 

(Psalm 126:1)

This Psalm has been a favorite of mine for many years. I've been in a habit of reading only first verses, then stop and wonder.

One feels the subtle "when" and "were." Subjunctive with anticipation. The verb shouts quietly: "turned," the reader looking for the exclamation mark. And "again" is loud.

But long weary expectation makes one cautious and wise. When deliverance comes you may barely believe it. Dreamy. Exhilaration mixed with fear: "Can it be real?"

Hope and humanity go together. When one is lost so is the other. It is human to hope, expression of Creator's latent mark. As sparks fly ever upward, as the soul longs for eternity, so we believe the time will come when all is made new and it will be a dream beyond all knowing.

Only God can do it. Some day He will turn again.

Moon Monday

Monday, I'm told, is the "day of the moon." The Sunday moniker made it easy. But the lazy mouth of word evolution gives us one less "o" in Monday and folks like me don't see it.

It makes sense to name primary markings of our lives after other primary markings. Nothing is more defining than a day, and few things are more fixed in cosmology than a moon. So we have a day for the Sun, one for the Moon, and one for Saturn. We'll see if I ever get to the meaning of Tu, Wed, or Fri. I know Thursday is after Thor but know not why the vowel changed.

In our world Monday brings a new week, though the traditional beginning was Sunday. Now we skip Sunday and pay homage to the work week as the beginning of all that matters. Or something like that. Much could be said about the difference between traditional Sunday and the first day of the work week for most folks. But it can wait.

What does Monday mean? It gets nothing from "moon" as far as I can tell except the already mentioned shared significance. 

Monday means, for most, the beginning of another week of work, a day to arrive a little out of sorts, and a day when less gets done, in the main, than the other three before Friday.

What will I do on Monday? Write this bit of reflection and go about seeing my Grandson -- (I must write about him, and soon) -- and attending to many chores in this day that already approaches wane. Now who knew that would happen? Wane is a word joined at the hip with the moon. A waning moon is one beginning to fade from full to new, just as this day will go from full to midnight in 10 hours or so, all of which will increasingly (though figuratively) demonstrate wane.

I wrote all the way to find that, subconscious at work. And you read all the way for the same!

Happy Monday! 

Saturday

Saturday is Saturn-Day, or so say the folks who know such things. The cause of words -- referents and some such which linguists and Webster's ilk know with nerdly skill -- pass beyond most imagination. We just say what we say and know what we mean, or think we do. To think is enough, as is to speak. To think about thinking -- yikes! I don't even want to think about thinking about thinking.

But I say Happy Saturday -- if I do -- and acknowledge some ancient god who was named after the planet. Or was the planet named after him? Who first contrived the sound arrangement contrived in English and presumably -- (I won't look it up!) - Greek?

In any case the planet is joined at the hip with a Greek god.

No, that's not quite right. The planet is not even in the picture but rather the name of the planet. This word -- Saturn -- is the referent. Okay I had to look that up. The planet is the object to which the word refers, thus the word referent.

So we really have no-thing, only a word and the words are only sounds in the head, though quiet. We could play this reductionist game until we die, quite literally reduced to nothing.

I was just trying to know what I mean when I write or think or speak "Saturday." This rabbit hole is way longer than I care to travel, so I will take this detour. If Saturday refers to Saturn, what does that mean? I see two options, for which the reader awaits with 'bated breath:

• It means nothing -- it is just a name. This is complete nominalism and is never really true. It must be forced onto reality. Everything is more than a name. In this case, at minimum, the name has sounds and is associated with days in the calendar and habits of life. It refers to more than a distant planet.
• It means everything "Saturn" means -- the planet, not the god (I still refuse to look that up.) Distant, large, unknown, bright in the sky, mysterious, beyond.

Saturday is that sometimes and sometimes not. This is a case in which we make of it what we will. Saturday is a day at the end of the week and I am weary from trying to learn anything about it.