celtic_writer

Rust

I like to walk out along the road to get the mail.

There's a letterbox out there I've used for the last 16 years. It is rusty. It states on the door that it's been approved by the postmaster general, so it can't be all bad. Thought about painting it many times, but then I stop myself.

I like its color of rust.

Yeah, I know its corrosion is caused by water, and rust's gobbling nature makes things fall apart. Rust frightens. It's not clean. Destruction, inactivity, neglect. But we are all rusty in some ways, aren't we? So it is part of the movement of life. And every day it makes the act of getting the mail like getting back in the saddle once more. You simply open the mailbox door and look inside its corrugated grey for some sort of surprise.

It is not Christmas every day in northern Virginia. But at this time in my life, nothing inside this rusty container along a country road frightens me. Bills come every month, and I pay them. Living simply keeps the content of these glassine-windowed envelopes acceptable.

I like when the Dalai Lama writes to me. It's always addressed personally to "Dear Friend", and filled with words seeking dough for the International Campaign for Tibet. The last one included a string of paper Tibetan prayer flags. Cheez, I love the thought of those things. String them outside your house and the blessings fly off in the wind to land on someone else in the world. Though methinks this string would last about 1.5 seconds outside in the wind and would detach and fly and tangle in the holly tree behind the back porch. Sturdier sanctity is needed in this Virginia. So I've strung 'em edge-to-edge on the bulletin board in my office that is so full of photos/paper, it could use some grace.

And the annual birthday card from my beloved Aunt Cookie. She never forgets. Ever. She and our favorite Uncle John have retired to the beach in Delaware, and have better things to do than send birthday cards. At 51, it still makes me smile. Though I have stopped shaking the cards so the ice cream money falls out. Well, sorta.

The other day I opened the mailbox door to find a box. I had forgotten I had ordered great ideas. Sent by a service called The Readers Subscription located in that great book mailing mecca of Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, I received 12 paperbacks from a publisher called Penguin. They are simple little books, light little numbahs from thinkers, radicals, pioneers and perhaps a visionary or two thrown in to make sure you are getting your money's worth:

The Symposium - Plato
The Art of War - Sun-tzu
The City of Ladies - Christine de Pizan
How to Achieve True Greatness - Baldesar Castiglione
Of Empire - Francis Bacon
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For - Henry David Thoreau
Conspicuous Consumption - Thorstein Veblen
Eichmann and the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt
Fear and Trembling - Soren Kierkegaard
A Vindication on the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

So the old postal container standing stoically along the road delivers rusty thoughts that can always be revisited. And tonight I will read, just before I fall asleep, and those long-ago published thoughts will be different. And as I turn out the light, I will remember that I am too.

Cultural Explanations

On this quiet Friday when the sun shone its smiley face all day, friend Quinn McDonald, artist and creativity coach, emailed a question used to help folks jumpstart creativity cells in their brains:

Pick six items in your house. How would you explain these items to a visitor from outer space who doesn’t understand our culture. Write down your answers.

Thankful George Dubya Bush doesn't live here, I looked for six things I could explain to the Martians, should their superior brains ever make the terrible decision of landing here in the yard in Mason Neck.

1) Walt: Black Lab. Canine. Male. 7 years of age. 80 pounds. Sweet, but magna cum laude graduate of Duh University. Walt is unafraid of alien visitors, except the garbage truck and vacuum cleaner. All guests from the outer reaches of the galaxy are forewarned they will be expected to throw Walt's kong toy for him 1.8 million times before they run screaming to their space ship to zoom off at light speed to get away from such earthling madness.

2) Margaret: Black Lab. Canine. Female. 12 years of age. 90 pounds, but don't tell her I told you. She is very sensitive. Never stops wagging tail, even in sleep. If Martians land and demand, "Take me to your leader!" Margaret would smile and bulldoze her big black head against their skinny Martian legs, knock their green bodies to the ground, then proceed to smooch their bulbous heads. She would then get a drink of water and take a nap.

3) Book. A written work printed on pages bound together so one can read and learn. There are hundreds in this house, but only good literature and thought-provoking essays are allowed. All other books get thrown across the room or against the nearest wall. Any Martian visitor would have to read such small tomes as Don Quixote, The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, and other works that are at least 600 pages. Just ask The Ya Ya Sisterhood Book Club of Mason Neck. They want to send me to the moon every time I get my way with a "classic" suggestion for the reading list.

4) Guitar. A stringed musical instrument played with the fingers, or a guitar pick. The sound is produced by vibrating strings, which in turn resonate the body and neck. All alien visitors will be subjected and expected to politely listen to such trad favorites as "Haul Away Joe" and "What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?" and should feel encouraged to participate in the splendid caterwauling. Please make note that Walt does not like the tune "Sweet Betsy from Pike." Methinks it is the reference to "the big yeller dog," but I am not sure.

5) CDs. A small optical disk on which data such as music, text, or graphic images is digitally encoded. There are probably close to 1000 such media in this house, due to music, archived programming jobs and movies. No, Mr. and Ms. Martian, you may not borrow the following music CDs: Sons of the Pioneers (featuring Roy Rogers), The Radiators (from New Orleans), Nat King Cole, any Van Morrison, or EmmyLou/Mark Knopfler. Clapton is also off limits. You always say you will bring them back, but you never do. Light years away. A likely story.

6) Coffee. Seeds that are dried, roasted, and ground to prepare a stimulating aromatic drink. Must be served so piping hot as to scald even the most hardy Martian tongue. Please add cream of the highest fat content. No decaf allowed. Wimps. Please note that my brother-in-law Dave roasts his own coffee, and shares it with family and friends. It is the best coffee I have ever consumed. He will never reveal the method, but the roasting process starts with an air popcorn popper. You didn't hear this from me.

So, all of you out there, what's in your house? The Martians want to know.

Graphic: The Sun by Emma Mary Mankin, age 7. Used with permission, in exchange for an apple fritter.

Circles

On this Saturday afternoon, the world is drenched. Water tables are down, gasoline prices continue to rise. We need the rain.

If the seasons are viewed as a circle, am sitting smack in spring's circumference. Yesterday, as I was working at my desk, Walt came by for a pet. He leaned his side against my leg, and I absentmindedly rubbed his back, as I was really paying attention to the programming code on the monitor screen. Soon I had a fistful of Black Lab fur. Ah...spring is here. The Black Labs are dropping their winter coats.

Out to the front yard we went, and I curried and brushed those two Black Lab steeds for about twenty minutes. Soon there were gobs and circles of Black Lab fur blowing gently across the green grass. Have a feeling much of it will end up intertwined with twigs in the nursery of nests now under construction in local trees.

When I was a child, and still Catholic, I thought God lived in circles, constantly turning, always going somewhere. That's how he could be in so many places at once. Just to go from wheel to wheel where he was needed most. On spring nights I would lay awake in my childhood bed, house windows newly opened, and listen to the sound of something possibly important in the squeal of impatient auto rubber moving on the street outside. I figured God's presence was needed in a hurry by some sinner somewhere. Yet I also knew, somehow, that the round God could be halted. Roller skates scratching down the sidewalk can bounce through cracks, though movement can be silenced by the unexpected pebble.

Silence returns us to unity from multiplicity. From the demanding questions shouted in class, from the numbing traffic-wait, from the incessant yacking of foolishness. I wonder what happens to us all, what goes away, only to return. Is it fresher? Perhaps it just has different meaning the next time around.

Last summer at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, I came upon an exhibit of the Plains Indians. They believed smoking was holy, that the circles of smoke delivered from a peace pipe gave physical form to words spoken or thought in prayer. Smoke carried messages into the sky where spiritual beings would notice them and help the people.

I suppose the creator is always recycled. From the wooden porch out behind this house, you can sit on the steps and view those nomadic stars, having so long ago burned circles of space in the dark sky from which to hang their light.