6.7.12

C'est La Mort

Alone in a crowded room. A girl clears her throat, carries on her conversation, one word building atop the other, moment by moment: a life passing on the other side of table. Does she notice? Does she feel the breeze stirred by a world turning the hands around the clockface? Stephen Crane wrote of the indifferent furor of nature, his oilerman facedown in the surf while the boat full of weaklings survived. Is this all there is? Minutes ticking by and - nothing more.

And I have to shake my shoulders and laugh, perhaps a bit cynically. Of course there is more. The thought brought into daylight looks absurd. Oh, but do I live like life means anything? As if my own future were a rock that I must push forward, head bent down, back straining. Do I remember what the horizon looks like? Some days. Sometimes, when the sun sets, I look up and catch sight of glory and seeing, remember too other twilights that were beautiful like this one but in different shades and hues.

Am I really alone here? Do You sit with me? Do You breathe this air You've created, or do You experience its delight through my delight? The wealthy man's tongue is dulled to the flavor of rich foods, and he rediscovers their joy when he feeds the poor. I do not realize the mechanics of learning and of numbers and patterns until I see the light dawn on Nicole's face as she grasps a math lesson and surpasses it in the scope of her understanding, and suddenly I appreciate the process, the elegance of the numbers, and the human intellect with its imprint of the divine. You made a beautiful world and called it good, but its goodness circles back when we give You praise for all that You have created.

Taste and see. Eat the mystery, that your eyes may be opened - not to the knowledge of good and evil, which blinds us, but to the earthshaking revelation of awe.

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