We were listening to an almost unending litany of disaster, contention and discord as we drove home last night. It was a national newscast and the call-in show surrounding it.
Don’t get me wrong. That’s the stuff from which news (and call-in radio) is made. I know because I do news. You really can’t use things like “Joe Blow Jr. said his first word today” and “Little Mary brought home an A-plus on her book report” because, as important as those things are, Junior isn’t bleeding and Mary didn’t commit fraud.
That could change if Junior said the wrong word and Mary paid someone to write the report. But I’ll stipulate that Junior said “Dada” while looking lovingly at his biological father and Mary really read the book, thought her own thoughts and turned them into words. Good job, Mary.
“Oh brother!” was what my wife Cathy said in downtown Piney Flats as the litany reached a crescendo, “It just makes you want to go fishing – and stay there.”
That isn’t news either. She’s said it before and so have many other people. Folks have said it for a very long time, centuries, even millennia. Fishing is recreation. Take a close look at that last word ‘recreation’ if you want to know why.
If you’d like to dismiss ‘recreation’ as an unimportant even distracting escape unworthy of consideration in perilous times you should dissect the word first.
“Re” means to repeat and “creation” means to construct something fresh, something anew.
That’s an apparent oxymoron. If you “re” it, how can it be fresh or new? That’s the problem with human words and thoughts. They’re all we have, and we use them to communicate what we perceive.
We’re small. We’re finite. But we have the capacity to conceive and express things that are infinite. From that capacity we have created science and religion, two sources of discord, contention and disaster. Even that act of creation appear to be an oxymoron.
For me and for her, the quiet sweep of currents around our legs, the play of light shadow on the water’s surface, the simple passage of time – and time is a current that whispers laughingly of mortality, can recreate wonder.
Wonder is what we need. Too many now speak of what is inevitable. Too many now speak of this moment. Too many now contend. Too many now are in discord.
We need to re-create wonder. We need to find a moment that comes to us undeserved, a moment beyond words, a moment that holds no contradictions.
There are harmonies. There are moments without portent.
For me and for Cathy they come when we have stepped into currents. When the play of light and shadow and the whisper of our mortality draws us out of the present and reveals what is everlasting.
ffadvice@aol.com
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