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| Sunflowers, Steve Brown 2025 |
Sustained belief in anything isn't easy, especially over the last decade. We seem to all be passengers on a runaway train headed towards catastrophic chaos, and instead of working together to somehow slow that train down, we yell and scream and throw apples and shoes and bananas and brief cases and circus fliers and political pamphlets and diapers and dynamite at each other, and yell, "Fowl, fowl fowl!"
Well sort of. We all have been through an awful lot together. COVID-19, three very-heated elections, a seemingly never-ending list of increasingly disastrous natural disasters, as well as political assignations and mass shootings. And that's completely skipping over the endless footage of bombs and carnage in Ukraine and Palestine we view together separately daily. And yet we still smile at each other at work, at church, and in the supermarket. We still say Thank-You in the drive-thru or in the bank. We unfriend our sister or brother in-law on Facebook because of their idiotic ideology and their politically warped brains, but we usually re-friend them again because they're family. Given the unending stress of our times, maybe we're actually handling the collective trauma of our times reasonably well.
Maybe. It really is very hard to believe in anything these days. Especially love and peace.
But stillness is still there if you're looking for it. On Saturday I went to get a hamburger. There was only one car ahead of me at the drive thru. It shouldn't have taken long. But the man in the truck ahead of me had this incredible ability to stick fourteen "Uh, let's see, I'll take, no, maybe, do you have?"'s into his one order for himself before he ever got to his car full of kids and a wife too. And the cashier had this incredible ability to say, "I'm so sorry, we're out of that, we're so busy, would you like, now take your time darling," between each of his "Uh, let's see, I'll take, no, maybe, do you have?"'s. And the sun was out, and it was hot, and I was hot, and I glared at him the best I could through his side mirror, me all righteous and mighty and angry and hot and pristine and vindicated in my holy cause to just get a hamburger and shake.
But, once the ordeal was over, I thought to myself, I can either take this frustration home with me and ruin my day, or I can go find a grand view and some shade.
So, I did just that. I hooked a right just past Steve's Tire, went past the golf course, through the narrow graffiti-plastered tunnel under the interstate and found some magnificently tall sun-bleached rye before thick straggly elms and a leaning barbed-wire fence. I opened my window to the sounds of cicada and the muffled interstate. And it was good, really good.
I think if we consciously take in such moments, if we actually sit back down in our seats, and look out the window at the blur of the country-side instead of yelling and screaming and tossing bananas and briefcases and dynamite and GOD!-pamphlets and political propaganda, and sit in our own emotional crud for a while, we just might get some ideas on how to actually slow the train down, and when we do, if we're all looking out those windows, all coming up with ideas, and if we share those out, open to listening, to adjusting our own thinking, refining, improving, adding upon--well, just maybe we can slow that train down enough to see if the disaster we think is coming is even necessary.
Maybe. I don't know. It's hard to believe in anything. But rye is real. Elms are real. The water running in the irrigation ditch is real--at least for now. And it is grounding, sustaining.
And if you don't have that, you have a parking lot looking out on a fantastic city skyline nearby, or there's a soccer game at a neighborhood park tucked back in an endless coil of shady suburban streets and cul-de-sacs.
There is peace in presence. If we choose it.
It may not be perfect, but it's got to be better than bullets and blood and dead people leaving behind their spouse and children to weep and wail.
Perhaps now is a time say less, move more slowly, listen to birds and cicada and think What am I doing to add to the chaos?
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