Everything Has Its Price

Another Excerpt from My Next Book

The sun is shining, but the wind is still blowing.  I’m wondering how long it will be before I can sit on our porch without a coat.  Spring here in Montana is not like the ones I grew up with in Arkansas.  Filled with blooming flowers and singing birds.

          Here, it’s mostly still brown, and the trees’ limbs are bare.  Some of my friends have a few crocuses peeking out.   Maybe I need to plant some of those.  The daffodils I planted when we moved into this house have stopped coming up or blooming.

          This is the hardest time of year for me, March and April.  We’ve been in the grip of winter since late October, usually.  So desperate for spring, but it comes so slowly—bits of sunshine, interspersed with clouds, rain, wind, and even snow.

          “Please, just come for good,” I say.  But it doesn’t.  Just keeps playing hide-and-seek.  What I call spring won’t get here until after Mother’s Day.  It will last a week or three, and suddenly it will be summer for six weeks, if we’re lucky.

          I guess it really is true that the four seasons here are Winter, June, July, and August.

          But there are a couple of good things about long winters.  First, the mountains look more impressive covered in snow.  And second, while driving in the mountains and foothills, you can see more of the vistas when the trees don’t have their leaves yet.

          Everything has its price.

To Plan or Not to Plan?

I know I'm paraphrasing Shakespeare, so I hope he doesn't mind.  With the Shelter-at-Home orders due to COVID19, I've been facing a challenge I've never encountered before.  We all have, I know.  Over the past three weeks all the plans I had for the next five months have gone out the window.  Or into the trash.  And yes, I know I'm not alone.

My quandry is whether to have a schedule for my empty days or not.  I've always been a planner, with a daily schedule on my bulletin board and a well-marked calendar on the wall. Setting up a new schedule has the appeal of helping me cope with everything and giving me some stability.  And a way to make sure I don't 'waste' my time.

On the other hand, now that the calendar is gone, along with the schedule, I feel a strange sense of liberation.  I can do what I feel now, go with the flow.  Though I admit I find myself playing Solitaire on my Kindle a lot.  But maybe I need this bit of down time in a stressed life.

Hmm...I'm not sure which is better.  To schedule or not to schedule, that is the question.  Any ideas out there?

Beyond Words

“Cast all your cares on him, for he cares for you.”  I Peter 5:7

One morning I woke up and I believed this again.  Gone was the voice in my mind that said, “Yeah sure.  So you say.”  Or “Whatever.”

Where did it go?  Will it come back?  I actually don’t know, but I don’t miss it, either.

One thing I remember about yesterday is that I finally realized it’s okay to let yourself grieve and question God. He knows we humans can’t help it.  It’s what we are.  I was wrong to expect myself to always be upbeat and positive—to keep wearing what I knew as “The Mask”.

God wants to let us grieve, and he even wants to grieve with us.  We humans can’t help asking, “Why, God?” He knows that, and he lets us ask, even though he doesn’t answer.  Now I see this is how he shows his love for us.

And then, somehow, he helps us move past the unanswered.  Instead he reassures us that he still cares, that he will still walk with us--even though he won’t always answer all our questions.  For instead of endless explanations and words, he just gives us a spiritual hug.  And somehow, we awake one morning and realize we are loved—beyond anything that words can ever express.

Thoughts for the Palindrome Day

BLOG FOR 02-02-2020 - supposedly a palindrome (reads the same forward and backward) like this occurs only once in 900 years.  Even rarer than Haley's Comet.

I’ve been reading a good book by Madeline L’Engle, entitled “Walking On Water”.  It’s about the creative process in relation to faith.  It especially cites the value of myth and fantasy in the human experience, both as reader and writer.  I first read it 35 years ago (it was published in 1980), but now it means much more to me.  Yes, I was writing fantasy-fiction back then, but now I’m much farther along the pathway of my life.  Many more experiences.

And it ties in very well with reading I’ve been doing recently about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, especially their thoughts on the value of “Faerie”--their word for myth and fantasy.  They saw it as “true” in the sense that it shows the human mind searching for truth—the truth they believed was ultimately revealed in Jesus.  (They called the story of Jesus the "Ultimate Myth" because it was "true".)

I also concur that myth and fantasy shouldn’t be summarily dismissed by our post-modern, fact-infused culture as “untrue” and therefore “unworthy.”  I can remember this being a prevalent attitude among conservative, fundamentalist Christians in my early years of marriage and child-rearing.  Yet, I still read and wrote fantasy, and found that it spoke to me in ways that merely “factual” writings didn’t.

Since L’Engle wrote her book in 1980, our culture has experienced a big return to fantasy.  Just as one example, there’s the 40+ years of continuing popularity of Star Wars.  And even Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter.  Or the popularity of movies based on the mythical heroes of Marvel Comics.  Some ultra-conservative Christians disdain these.  But I find myself agreeing more and more with Lewis, Tolkien, and L’Engle. (Speaking of disdain, L’Engle was criticized by conservatives for naming one of her spiritual characters in A Wrinkle in Time, Mrs. Which, because it sounded like witch.) 

But after nearly 70 years on this earth myself, I believe we as humans appear to have a need for “Faerie”, and when it is denied, the pendulum somehow manages to swing back to it again and again.  I think it shows we have a deep need for faith in some form, no matter how much culture tries to separate us from it.  Dare I say “amen”?

What's the Big Deal?

Why Solstices and Equinoxes?

I can remember as a child in elementary school learning about the Equinoxes and Solstices.  Maybe I was more interested in earth science and astronomy than my peers, but the image of the globe tilted on its axis, turning each pole in turn toward the sun in its yearly circle, has stuck with me all these years.

About eight years ago, I asked my geographer son to build me a miniature Stonehenge in our backyard.  He was glad to oblige, and used his dad’s GPS to accomplish a very accurate placing of each of the sight-stones in relation to the central one.  I can now tell exactly where the sun will be on our horizon at each solstice and equinox.

Why was this important to me?  I think partly because I need to remind myself that even when things in my world are growing dark, I can look forward to the eventual return of light.  That life is not just a linear journey from birth to death.  That it’s also cyclical.

As many of my Facebook friends know, I annually count down to the Winter Solstice.  This is the one I look toward the most, for it represents the coming back of light.  It was important to ancient cultures too, as we can see from the many ancient monuments like Stonehenge, which are oriented to show exactly when the solstices will come.  I actually find it surprising that so many of my friends now comment that they look forward to my countdown.  Maybe there’s an ancient “memory” in our DNA that points to these same times of the year that were so important to our ancestors

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Ironically though, as our world grows darker in most ways, we try to push back that dark with our artificial lights.  Whether they are street lights or Christmas lights, they actually block out the stars that our ancestors looked to for guidance.  Some places on earth, including Glacier National Park, are promoting their dark night skies, ideal for stargazing.  People even talk about “light pollution” now in all our urban areas.  Astronauts in space can tell exactly where the cities are as they orbit the night side of earth.  Each metropolitan area and even small towns are seen by their artificial lights, clumps and strings of them scattered across the face of the globe.  I wonder if it sometimes looks to these spacemen like a disease on the surface of the earth.

While we keep trying to find ways to push back the dark, maybe we need to be looking more for the lights within ourselves.  Yes, our world is a mess and seems to be getting worse almost daily.  But perhaps if each of us tries to let our lights shine out to others around us, we can do a better job of pushing back the dark.

Advent and the Solstice

I'm about a month late with this blog, but I'm going to post it.  I'm not getting much notice anyway.

"The people who dwelt in darkness have seen a great light..." (somewhere in Isaiah)
This is one of my favorite verses for Advent, the four weeks before Christmas.

And Advent is my favorite season of the church year, despite the fact that it's the darkest period in the seasons--in the northern parts of the globe.

I think I've always felt the need to look to "the light of the world"--Jesus.  Especially in the dark season of the year.  Jesus is associated with light in many parts of the church year.  And so we get out all those Christmas lights to brighten the darkness closing in around us.  I often wonder what it would be like in the southern hemisphere where there is no Christmas in their winter.  How difficult!

I'm also sure this is why I count down to the Winter Solstice, when the light begins to return.  And I'm not the only one.  Witness all the ancient monuments like Stonehenge that relate to pinpointing the solstices.

The world around us today is getting darker all the time, and not just physically.  All our artificial lights try to hold back the darkness, but instead they obscure the stars in the night sky that our ancestors used as their inspirations and guides.  I hope we can choose not to dwell in the world's darkness and so-called light, and instead embrace the Light of the World.

A Call for Comments

I know I've been very inconsistent with my blog this year.  Once a month was my goal.   I started well, as most New Year's resolutions do.  But I wasn't getting any comments that people liked my blogs of chapters of my next book.  Was anyone reading them?  It appears not, because I've gotten no comments when I stopped posting them

However, I will reconsider posting more of "The Journeys Saga", if there's anyone out there who cares about it.  So I need to hear.  Okay?