Thoughts Negligible

…the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Today's the first day of my summer, and I awoke alive, after three hours of sleep, too excited to return to slumber. I'll be heading home tomorrow in time for Mom's Day. It's great because I'm ready to live now. I've got big plans! At the beginning of spring I start to thaw, but by finals I'm a drone, plodding through life as if my lot is to make A's and try hard not to be too depressed. I can't help it, I just forget to live, forget the present and its "freely given canvas." By summer I can think and feel again. Spring breezes have wisped away the last final, the last hurriedly written essay, the last sleepless night, even the pain experienced in a semester. It's sad really, at this point in my life I measure time by essays and deadlines, semesters and summers.

My thawing process begins with the quickening of spring, which reminds me to read Annie Dillard, which frees me from monotony. If you were going to be stranded on a desert island with room in the bag for one book, or were going to die after the next 288 pages you read, and so desperately wanted my advice as what to take or read, I would never hesitate, now and forever, to recommend (almost tearfully plea) you take Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Never before have I been so challenged and excited to take in each moment and to see things in the world I never knew were there. To hallow the beauty and meaning of it all. Dillard is not some romantic nature observer; she's fire! Don't take the Bible! Take Dillard! You have enough memorized Scripture to do you fine and, most likely, if you're on an island, a missionary will find you soon enough and dump a handful of green New Testaments in your hands: "Share them with your friends!" If he's got black pants, a black tie and white shirt, and found you on his bike, and the book is blue, don't take it! Just starve with Tinker Creek in your hand. You'll die quicker of boredom by reading the blue book anyhow.

Just go to the library and spend an hour pouring over chapters 2 and 6--"Seeing" and "The Present": "Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you can catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall."

Did you ever think you could learn something about the world--even God!--by reading how a giant water bug sucks the liquefied innards from a frog? You won't, unless you see it for yourself or have Annie Dillard describe it to you. What about a female mantis mating with the always-sex-ready male as she devours his head down to his abdomen, where he just can't stop? Literally, his body's sayin' yes but his mind is sayin' no (did I just quote Brittany Spears?).

Have you ever seen the lights in the trees? I never had until Annie Dillard told me about them. Have you ever watched a 4.6 billion year-old sun set just past a green pasture while little calves--only weeks old--buck and run like little black shadows? Well then come to my house this summer! We'll have a beer and sit on the corner posts of the barbed wire fence, get oxidizing beige paint on our asses, and take it all in; we'll watch till the last light drains the sky and leaves us in black. I'm serious: Come! After that we might walk down to our own little Tinker and listen to the water if it hasn't been too dry. Then we'll talk about the 5 billion years the sun has left before it croaks, eats up the earth and all the energy that was once you and I, then collapses on itself. Where were you when the sun died? We'll talk about catching neutrinos! They pass right through your body, a thousand trillion of them in the time it takes you to read this sentence. You'll say, "And we'll never catch one." We'll laugh until we realize what a metaphor for so many other things that little neutrino is. That's the point: reverence. Reverence, mystery, and awe. God's fierce, he is, and if we ever thought otherwise I wonder why we serve him in the first place. It's a captivating display of love and might, even terror, but we've got nothing else to do but turn our faces to the burning white world, then, like so many monks and sages, we'll see what's in ourselves.

Get ready to be annoyed by all my meandering summertime "Natural Meditations."