drivel

I have shoveled no snow in 5 years this coming April.  Winters in the Huntsville, AL area pretty easy, like a cold summer in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Ya might get snow…  On the flipside, we were jolted out of REM cycle very early to tornado warnings going off on our phones.  I turned over and went back to sleep.  Beth, I guess, huddled under the covers waiting for that ominous whooshing train sound…  I’m having my second cup of coffee at 0700 feeling rested and looking out serenely through the picture window in our breakfast nook, writing drivel.  Beth is sprawled under disheveled bedding trying to locate the rest that eluded her in the wee small hours.   In a short while she will detangle her limbs and extract herself from bed, walk into the kitchen where I am, and this bubble of silent serenity will be broken.  Maybe we’ll eat something, she will shower, then we’ll quarrel about going to church. 

As this was the week of Valentine’s Day, which I slightly, but grudgingly acknowledge as a real holiday, I discovered something share-worthy in my reading. It struck in my soul like a hammer on an anvil.  I do not hate St. Valentine, or despise his plight. But this holiday we… “celebrate”…  is not about St. Valentine.  It was hoisted onto Americans in order to incite folks to spend money on frivolity in a time of the year when things are financially tight.    Regardless, I read something that I have to call attention to, that resonates not in the superficial Valentine’s Day way, but in the most pointedly authentic Valentine-y way.  Here it is:

“I do understand that you can look into someone’s eyes and suddenly know that life would be impossible without them, know that their voice can make your heart miss a beat, and know that their company is all your happiness can ever desire, and that their absence will leave your soul alone, bereft.”

It is from a book titled The Winter King by Bernard Cornwell, written about an ancient time and story that is being buried these days by fallacious reckonings.  The romance we visage in movies-the most prominent medium of story-telling today – is a shallow, distorted, and sometimes grossly absurd kind.  This quote is written in a time when people’s lives were in a fog of danger every minute, and life was so utterly valuable because lives were treated so very cheaply.  We do not know each other like this anymore.  This quote is intended to be romantic.  But the verve of it is lost in basic human connections.  Though I am tempted to loath our time in history because of the technologies that have made living so easy (irony here-I would not be alive without these technologies), I grieve that our humanness has been so corrupted by it.  Folks do not connect with each other anymore at those deep soul levels-the ones marginally revealed in this quote.  It is so prevalent and easy to privately 'cancel' someone when they do absolutely nothing for you, or you for them.  It’s not even possible for that thought to exist when you would be counting on them to help bring in your crop, protect your family and livestock from wolves or raiders, or stand in a shield wall with them defending your homestead and crops, hoping you still live to harvest… 

Not so many generations ago, living had that kind of a ring to it.  Neighbors, folks down the street, people meant something, relationship had a deeper value, or perhaps, it only seems that way.  My grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, and their lives were scented with that deeper kind of tribal-ish vibe.  That is why nonsense, or what Grandpa branded “foolishness” was little tolerated.  Foolishness has now crawled into the highest offices of the land, and from our land into the deep crevices of global humanity, ripping and destroying.  And if I did not believe in the inherency of the Bible, I could see the world soon falling into a post-apocalyptic time, worse resembling those ancient, brutal times.  “Don’t know whatcha got til its gaw-wone…” -Cinderella.  From a genre of music marked by flight from anything profound, this song hit on something real, probably by accident.

Selah…

Like it’s titled:  drivel.