Wednesday, September 03, 2008
FROM MORNING DRIVE JOURNAL
SEPTEMBER 4, 2002
The whole world and its bright blue fullness are reflected in the still surface of the pond down the hill. I can hear water rushing over the dam - it's that, or a tractor in a distant field, a steady, throbbing roar.
You are everything you wish to be, or else you should be paddle pretty hard for parts elsewhere. We are either victims or not. If we choose victimhood, we choose loss. Even in the direst circumstances, if we choose struggle, joy, acceptance, then we choose life. That's how I'd like to face death - not as a victim but as one who lives in every moment, even the last one. I do not know if I'm such a good man as that, however, that I could choose life at the very last. Of course, as Yoda says, there is no try, there is only do and not do. I shall choose life in the last moment.
Where do these thoughts of last moments come from, especially on such a lovely day? Well - darkness is the other side of light; they are not inseparable. Sorrow is the other side of joy; death is the other side of this teeming blue life I'm full of this morning.
You look out across the lawns and think you could lick the dew off them; you think you could walk with wet feet all the way to Lake Michigan.
No wind in the flag at the cemetery. The musky smell of green everything. Waste water being sprayed just north of town. A county fellow mowing the ditch along Highway E. A field of beans turning at season's end. Stalks of field corn turning, too, all the way up to the brown ears which turned first.
SEPTEMBER 4, 2002
The whole world and its bright blue fullness are reflected in the still surface of the pond down the hill. I can hear water rushing over the dam - it's that, or a tractor in a distant field, a steady, throbbing roar.
You are everything you wish to be, or else you should be paddle pretty hard for parts elsewhere. We are either victims or not. If we choose victimhood, we choose loss. Even in the direst circumstances, if we choose struggle, joy, acceptance, then we choose life. That's how I'd like to face death - not as a victim but as one who lives in every moment, even the last one. I do not know if I'm such a good man as that, however, that I could choose life at the very last. Of course, as Yoda says, there is no try, there is only do and not do. I shall choose life in the last moment.
Where do these thoughts of last moments come from, especially on such a lovely day? Well - darkness is the other side of light; they are not inseparable. Sorrow is the other side of joy; death is the other side of this teeming blue life I'm full of this morning.
You look out across the lawns and think you could lick the dew off them; you think you could walk with wet feet all the way to Lake Michigan.
No wind in the flag at the cemetery. The musky smell of green everything. Waste water being sprayed just north of town. A county fellow mowing the ditch along Highway E. A field of beans turning at season's end. Stalks of field corn turning, too, all the way up to the brown ears which turned first.
