Salty and Sweet

This morning brought yet another stumbling block in my path toward professional advancement. I'm hoping, in time, that I can summon the patience and work to make this stumbling block into a stepping stone. Much of this anxiety immediately left me when upon my return home this evening I saw no less than ten children jumping on the trampoline in our backyard. Spring and frolic are an overdue thing in Minnesota.

Still, I chose to self-medicate tonight with some buttered popcorn. While popping the popcorn I thought of my good friend Cash. His favorite treat is popcorn. This thought reminded me of the moment when I knew he and I were going to be good friends.

It all started when Cash and his able and wonderful wife Marisa had invited my family and I to dinner. After dinner they asked us if we wanted some ice cream. Of course we said yes because ice cream is our favorite treat. Out came a very small scoop of ice cream in an even smaller clear glass bowl. You know, the kind of bowl in which you place chopped onions or parsley in preparation for cooking. Now, you have to understand that in the family I grew up in when you have ice cream it means you can easily down a half gallon between two or three people. So the shock of seeing ice cream in this small a quantity was not soon to leave me. Anyway, the second time they invited us over for dinner we retired to their living room. Again, Cash asked if we wanted some ice cream. I said, "That depends. Are you actually going to give us ice cream, or are you only going to tease us with a palate cleanser?" This brought about a good laugh and Cash's confession that he doesn't really like ice cream . . . which lead me to discover that he does like popcorn. And when I say he likes popcorn, I mean he likes it with a lot of butter . . . and not that stuff with water in it, either! Butter . . . the greasier the better.

Anyway, tonight after I had my buttered popcorn - some of which I spilled on to my favorite french cuff shirt . . . may the grease remedy work . . . I chased it down with a bowl of ice cream. I know, decadent, eh? I'll have to swim an extra few laps tomorrow. But I told that story to inquire about how it is that friendships develop. I mean, I understand that chance and good fortune seem to play some role, but perhaps, had I not mocked Cash's gift of ice cream or had he not reacted so positively than we might not be the friends we are. But, then again, I suppose that's only one possibility among the pluriverse.

Dreamy Scipio

In these troublesome antics, we may even find it wise on occasion to adopt incongruous perspectives for the dwarfing of our impatience. We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made institutions – but beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsolvable Enigma, the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our speculations may run the whole qualitative gamut, from play, through reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dread – for always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to interstellar infinity and inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion between man and no-man, there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss.

- Kenneth Burke, Permanence & Change

For men were brought into existence in order that they should inhabit the globe known as the earth, which you see here at the centre of this holy space. They have been endowed with souls made out of the everlasting fires called stars and constellations, consisting of globular, spherical bodies which are animated by the divine mind and move with marvellous speed, each in its own orbit and cycle. . . .

While I looked more and more intently down at the earth Africanus checked me. 'How long,' he asked, 'do you propose to keep your eyes fastened down there upon that world of yours? Look up, instead, and look round at the sacred region into which you have now entered.

'Strive on,' he replied. 'And rest assured that it is only your body that is mortal; your true self is nothing of the kind. For the man you outwardly appear to be is not yourself at all. Your real self is not that corporeal, palpable shape, but the spirit inside. Understand that you are god. You have a god's capacity of aliveness and sensation and memory and foresight; a god's power to rule and govern and direct the body that is your servant, in the same way as God himself, who reigns over us, directs the entire universe. And this rule exercised by eternal God is mirrored in the dominance of your frail body by your immortal soul. - Cicero, The Dream of Scipio

God in Texas

I remember walking down the road toward the cotton fields in Abbot when I was six or seven years old, and finding a piece of quartz. I didn't know it was a mineral. I thought it was a rock, a curious shiny purple stone. The more I looked at it in the morning sunlight, the deeper I saw the shapes and colors and intricate intensity in the quartz. It felt very warm in my hand. I glanced down at the ground and saw tiny bits of rock shining up at me from the dirt, and I had a flash of illumination. This piece of quartz was not a separate thing from the shiny bits, or from anything else. Everything was one thing held together by some power.

In school and in church they tried to knock this awareness out of me by teaching other ways of viewing the world, but I never lost it entirely. . . .

I recently saw an interview with one of the hostages who had escaped his kidnappers in Lebanon after a few months of being blindfolded and chained alone in a room. He told the interviewer that during the first week of confinement, he started talking to himself. Then suddenly he realized he wasn't talking only to himself - he was talking to God. "It's true," he said. "I can talk to God, and it's real. Those guys in the Old Testament who said they talked to God, they really did it. I never believed any of this stuff before. I thought anybody who said they talked to God was crazy. But in that room I found out I was talking to God, and God was answering me through my intuition - not a Charlton Heston voice booming through the roof. God was talking to me through my inner being. You can talk to God, too. Try it, you can do it."

The interviewer switched the subject, clearly a little nervous, but you could tell from the look on the ex-hostage's face that he was a changed person. It had taken an extreme circumstance to get his full attention, but when he began to hear his inner voice responding to his cries and his anger, he learned to talk to God.

You can learn to do it.

Sit on top of a mountain in the Hill Country at sunset, looking off at the mountains and ridges poking up as far as you can see to the west, and pretty soon your inner self begins to see the smoke signals put up by the ancient Indians on the distant ridges, one after the other, and you will reach an inner peace that becomes a conversation with God. This is called meditation, and it is a much easier way to reach God than being handcuffed in a bare room in Beirut. But you don't need either a peaceful, meditative situation or a hostile, threatening situation to talk to God. I talk to God all the time.

-Willie Nelson