Stay connected

To admit my age, I remember the first long-distance phone call I ever made.  As a child, I found it almost a Christmas-like experience to be able to talk to a friend who’d moved to another state. A wall-mounted, black telephone with a rotary dial was my lifeline to a disembodied voice. I couldn’t imagine the friend’s new home, her new room, her new school, or her new friends. In fact, I was having a hard time imagining her at all. Her face was dissolving even as we struggled to find still-common ground. I felt that I was speaking to a void.

Today, even the folks closest to us are lost in that void. How many face-to-face conversations do we really have?

We text each other from different rooms in the same building. Increasingly, even those disembodied voices on a telephone—most often a cell phone—are a last resort ONLY if texts, emails, or Instant Messages fail. “Facebook” is a verb, we tweet to complete strangers as though we know them, and we invent, by the moment, new electronic connections to remove us from the messy necessity of human contact.

In the click of our mouse, we can “unfriend” someone. And, as growing cybercrime shows, it’s all too easy to create a persona that masks the truth and causes all kinds of malicious possibilities.

All these connections have created a disconnect that makes communication not only disembodied, but frequently anonymous. It’s easy to assume there’s no responsibility or accountability for the words of an online persona. Tragically, many have found otherwise.

There are good things, to be sure, and I love that part of social media especially. Friends long lost are now regularly in my Facebook news feed. But I’m also alarmed that we’re losing the delicate nuances of human interaction, our ability to “know” another in dimensions that require time and space and all of the human senses.

We tweet, we blog, we Facebook, we email, we post. We “talk,” but does anyone hear?

Tinsel-Down

It's January 4.  And the Christmas lights in our small town are keeping an early morning vigil, sentinels of a season now past. It's the paradoxical season of letdown endings and new beginnings.  It's the season of fresh starts and leftovers.  It's hope for what lies ahead and disappointment for what was left behind. We're in that caught-in-between-time.  Are we waxing or waning?

I never know what to make of the first of a year.  Those of us who don't value sleep stay awake until midnight to cheer the dropping of a ball and a brand-new date on our calendars.  The realists among us know that new date also signals time lost, never to be regained.  Time may be opening a new vista in front of us, but that vast chasm left behind us grows ever larger while what lies ahead is ever-shrinking. 

So, as we start the beginning of new year, I always wonder.  Are we celebrating the possibilities?  Are we whistling at a wake? 

What do you think?

Persephone descending

It's a season of endings.  Glorious, brilliant departures.  The final burst before the drab, dreary Novembers of our souls.  The time in the South when we can revel in the softening sunlight that leaves our days too soon in darkness. In the monochromatic Mississippi winter, we'll look wistfully over the horizon for signs of the first hyacinth. 

Persephone, that goddess of spring, is about to descend into the underworld. This is my favorite time of year, warm with a bittersweet beauty all the more lovely because of its briefness.  Each tree vies with the next for brilliance, dropping their colors even as I stroll by.  

Soon, these flaming canopies will be anorexic arms stretched before a blank sky.  To me, winter is the invisible season:  the in-hiding season, the time of drawing to the fire and crossing your arms against the wind outside the door.  I enjoy this beauty today with the knowledge of its coming absence.

 It's the season I always turn to Gerard Manley Hopkins, who beautifully captured the tension of transience.

Spring and Fall

to a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow's springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

 

I wish I had a river

It's the 12th of November, but it seems to be coming on Christmas.  Or so the signs and non-seasonal decorations tell us.  Last night as I drove home in the post-Daylight Savings Time darkness, I noticed the local county co-op alight with wreaths, ornaments, and outdoor garlands.  It's the same everywhere I look.  It's been that way here in the nearly tropical South since sometime before Halloween, when I passed a fashionable home long after dark and noticed a fully decorated, brightly lit Christmas tree glowing in the living room.

What's going on here?  I'm feeling holiday compression.

Advent, to me, is a particular and very special time in the religious tradition I celebrate.  It's come, instead, to mean the Gold Rush of sales promotions, the stampede to living better materially. People actually get up at 2 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving to get those 5 a.m. WalMart promotions.  Me, I sleep in.

We're not in the Southern hempisphere, just the American South, for goodness' sake.  The heart of the Bible belt.  Please, please, please give me some breathing room to celebrate Thanksgiving and time to remember all for which I'm truly grateful.

Give me a river.  A Joni Mitchell blue one.

It's coming on Christmas

They're cutting down trees

They're putting up reindeer

And singing songs of joy and peace

Oh I wish I had a river

I could skate away on

But it don't snow here

It stays pretty green

I'm gonna make a lot of money

Then I'm going to quit this crazy scene. . .

Well, at least part of that is true.  And to all, I say, enjoy the fall while we have it.



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?