Sunday, September 30, 2012

Turnings

There is a different tenor to cut grass in the fall. The smell has mellowed; the feel has changed. It's difficult to tell whether there is a real, physical difference, or whether the fall fund drives and the warming leaves and the cooling air have all colluded to make the last few mowings of the season seem strangely significant, like a soft, wistful, anticipatory turning from the picnics and the green woody cathedrals and the barefoot splashes in the mountain waters of summer toward the soft mittens and snowy eyelashes and warm, chocolaty mugs all sprawled out in the glow of the fireplaces of winter.

Ignore my grammatical errors. I am taking poetic license. I have been listening to the News from Lake Wobegon.

There was talk of a "travel club" in which the members met every month and took turns speaking of their imaginary travels, and showed slides borrowed from the library, and sang songs from the host country, and ate its food, and imagined. And sometimes, imagined moments are what we need. Sometimes they are nearly as good as the real thing. He said,

"Sometimes, you just need to look reality in the face, and deny it."

Everyone laughed, and I laughed and clapped alone in my car where I sat trapped by my unwillingness to miss any of the News, and it was just so true.




In church today, or the weekly meeting that I generally attend each Sunday that roughly approximates a church service, one of the questions brought up was this:

What if we learned to stop objectifying people based on their sexuality or behavior? What if instead we learned to see the humanness of each person we met, and to recognize, about each one, that this is somebody's baby. That this is someone's beloved. How would that change how we thought about and treated our fellow humans? How would that change the world?

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