What's your definition?

Thinking about the word ‘crisis’ today, because it gets thrown around a lot.

Economic crisis.  Crisis of confidence.  Health care crisis.  Environmental crisis. Crisis of leadership.  Personal crisis.  Identity crisis. Mid-life crisis.

What’s the opposite?  Because we don’t hear much about it. 

If crisis is “disaster,” is the opposite “prosperity”?  “Functioning”?  “All systems go?”

If crisis is “catastrophe,” is the opposite “doing just fine, thanks”?  “Status quo”?  “Issue-free”?

Interestingly, one of the definitions of crisis is “change,” which leads me to wonder if it’s accurate to say, “What we have here is a crisis of change”?  Or is that redundant?

At its heart, crisis is exactly that.  Change is immovably, irrevocably inevitable, as is our instinct to dig in and say, “But not to me.”  And when we face that change—or the necessity for us to change—what do we do?  Why, we declare a crisis.

Some circumstances merit the word.  A Katrina.  A Haiti.  Toxic sludge, toxic oil, genocide.

But what passes for a crisis these days is often a fear that our own circumstances might be affected.  We may have to get by with less.  We may have to do more.  We may have to do something beyond contemplate our next purchase or plan our next vacation.  Something may just grab hold of us and demand—because there’s no other choice—that we face some hard choices.  We may be required to act on principles that spew so easily from our mouths as insubstantial words.

There’s a word for that, too, equally abused.  It’s called character. 

What's the story here?

Everything you see has a story, whether you stop to think about it or not.  I stopped in my tracks, if you will, when I spotted this inexplicably abandoned pair of work boots on a railroad track near a popular downtown restaurant. 

What disembodied, barefooted soul (or sole), left them here, as though literally walking out of them?  Did he have a getaway ride idling nearby in the night, or did he just get too darned hot in the 100-degree Mississippi summer and opt for the freedom of loamy grass between his bare toes? 

Perhaps the erstwhile walker was suddenly abducted by aliens, whisked away into the mysteries of deep space by invisible UFO forces that--for reasons only they know--suddenly abandoned Area 51.  Who knows the story?  What the facts are you see before you:  these boots don't look likely to walk again anytime soon.



Could this be part of the otherworldly contingent, come to collect the now-bootless, and, I'm guessing, vanished, walker?  These neon-glowing butterflies no doubt were the vanguard of larger, more substantial flying objects tracking their prey on a still Mississippi, moonless night.  What harmless creatures could possibly produce such unnatural colors with such persistent luminosity?

There surely are, to keep my punmanship going, more pedestrian explanations for both of these images.  But I so prefer the wild flights of imagination that everyday, taken-for-granted objects can inspire.  Don't you?

Through the Looking Glass

This is a photo of a mirror, reflecting a reflection in a window that's reflected in the mirror. 

Confused? 

Life can be like that.  What we perceive sometimes is nothing more than an illusion of something totally reversed, much as it is in Alice's through-the-looking-glass experience.  It's upside down, backwards, and totally inexplicable. 

Sometimes it's better just to accept that and not try to impose logic on an illogical situation.  Sorry, all you engineers and economists reading this. 

In this world, there's the possibility for dreams, for impossible possibilities such as a Red Queen, and for flights of creative fancy. 

What you don't see in this photo is the phantasm that has inhabited this space for at least the last 50 years, known through footfalls on hardwood floors with no one else in the house, or through music strangely filtering through empty rooms with no apparent source, or through unusual indentations on beds that haven't been used.

It's only recently that the logical, organized, show-me person in the household has casually mentioned seeing the, oh, shall we just be honest and call it a ghost?  Those of us who grew up in the household know the spirit, which we consider completely benign, but we've never actually had a sighting.

So the pragmatist among us says it's a female figure, nearly transparent, and floating quietly and quickly into obscurity, as though hiding. Who am I to say otherwise?

In this artwork, drawn by a talented young woman who spent a lot of time in our household--this very house--as a child, a young girl gazes into a mirror.  What does she see?  It's a mystery.  It's whatever we imagine that she sees.

So on a day of infinite possibilities, isn't it wonderful to imagine whatever world your heart desires?  And to wonder if perhaps there's a benign spirit watching, ever so discreetly and carefully, over you?  

Seeking silence

As the frantic activity of another school year begins, I find myself envisioning the calmness of a life in the eye, rather than the fury, of the storm.  Would it be a respite or simply a deadening coda?

The question made me think of a poem written in my 14-year-old youth, my first and last poem ever published.  It's long since lost, but I remember a couple of lines:

Silence is not practiced as much as it once was
This generation has never felt its soft breath or its heart throb

It's hard to imagine the great void of nothing that is silence, the "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is," in the beautiful words of Wallace Stevens.  We don't like silence.  We don't like to experience its weight and the creeping fear of being absorbed by just our own thoughts.  We go to great lengths to avoid being left with them.

So we engineer an orchestra of white noise and electronic distractions to keep ourselves occupied--I hesitate to say entertained--to fill every nook or cranny of brain space that a stray thought can suddenly find.  We overload our senses and deaden our sensibilities.  We've become noisy walking dead.

Only after reading Thomas Merton did I realize that silence is, in fact, a real practice.  It is an absence that is, paradoxically, the presence of something profoundly disquieting, if you'll pardon my choice of words.

Even in a small town, there is the constant rattle of neighborhood noises:  the dogs that won't be quiet, the engines that won't be stilled, the lawnmowers that buzz and drone, the sirens that transport a crisis, the televisions that intrusively pacify.

In the countryside, I begin to find intimations of silence:  the great dome of the sky, the chilling cry of coyotes through a still night, the unimaginable open space that suggests you're alone.  And the knowledge that the vastness will continue, with or without you.  It takes courage to confront that silence.

Thomas Merton understood that.  His journals describe the most meaningful confrontation silence affords:  knowledge of and beyond ourselves.

Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin.  It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.

And so, I'm left with another question as I contemplate the demands of silence.  Do I dare? And, do I dare?

Smile when you call me that

One of my favorite classics is Owen Wister's western novel "The Virginian," a tale of a rugged, unpolished frontier cowboy and the softening effect a "civilized" school ma'arm has on him.  He is pitted against an Iago-like nemesis by the name of Trampas, who early in the book refers to the title character by a name that could be considered affectionate or contemptuous.

In a lethal voice, packing a gun loose in its holster, the Virginian tells him, "Smile when you call me that."

Indeed.  The contempt resonating in our labels can be polarizing and demeaning.

You can call me lithe; you can call me slim; but please don't call me skinny.  There's the fire of ridicule in at least one of those descriptions.

And so it is with words that, of themselves, suggest no more and no less than their meanings.  I'm a liberal arts major, for instance.  That means I've studied a broad range of courses in culture, language, literature, philosophy, and other subjects.

I'm pretty proud of being a liberal arts major.  It's a description I like. But the word 'liberal' itself is much maligned, I fear.

In its purest sense, liberal means tolerant of different viewpoints, open-minded, progressive politically or socially.  In its purest sense, conservative means favoring traditional values and customs, cautious and restrained, careful.  Depending on who you are, there's something to admire in either, whichever way your inclinations and beliefs lead you.  There's room for common ground if we happen to be of different minds.

But, I suggest, both terms have been co-opted and corrupted, serving whatever Pavlovian purposes their users intend.  They've been put in a "wrong" and a "right" category, depending on your viewpoints.  A "for" and "against"  A "me" and "you."  A "not on your life will I ever discuss this with you and really talk WITH you" corner.

Surely there's more room for dialog instead of diatribe.  Surely we all have, buried somehwere deep inside us, just a little of the liberal arts instinct to analyze, weigh evidence, and see the possibilities for more than one interpretation. 

But if not, I beg you this:  whatever label you affix to me, smile when you call me that. 

The middle of nowhere

This is a view from my car's GPS system.  It's from the county my father was born in, a county he traveled in another time as the sheriff.  He knew these roads without GPS and maps, in daylight and in the wee hours of the morning when there were domestic disturbances usually involving alcohol.

I live here now, traveling highways as familiar to me as the sound of a friend's voice on the phone.  In all my life, I've never heard the name "Vinton," which you'll see in the lower right-hand corner.  It's only 10 miles or so from my house, but I've somehow missed it in following just the well-known Highway 50.

We live, according to this map at any rate, in the middle of nowhere.  No congestion.  No air quality issues.  No long, frustratingly inching commutes. 

On the other side of that, we have few high-end restaurants, no movie theater, no mass transportation, no neighborhood groceries,, and certainly no international airport. 

What we do have is history.  We know each other and each other's parents and children.  We pull together in crisis, flocking to each other with casseroles and pies.  We take care of aging parents and ailing family members.  We share stories and triumphs.  We take pride in our parks and walking trails, the beauty of the space around us. 

It is not a pastoral utopia, by any stretch.  Even in the middle of nowhere there are crime and drugs, abuse and neglect, and there is loneliness.  There's the foul rag and bone shop of the heart beating strongly.

I've lived in much larger cities, but I choose here.  Here in the middle of nowhere I find there's much left to learn.