Books
Well, new smells at least.
I am sitting at my desk near the end of a breath-taking sunrise. The constantly throbbing colours from red to pink and blue, all filtering through shifting banks of fog have held me spell bound. I’ve watched from the first smudge of dawn, about an hour ago. What bliss! Behind me on the floor is a small mountain of books. They are tumbled and scattered and my day will involve sorting through them and deciding which will go on the bookshelf. The rest will be handily stored in the basement.
I’ve owned books for over seventy years starting with ‘Sleepy Time Tales’ and “Choo Choo.’ Yes, they’re here on the shelf. It is amazing to thinking that with all my travelling and moving on that I have anything from all those years ago. I was also taken aback to realize that a good many of these books were carried on board my boats. I recall fitting extra shelves to hold them all. Somehow I have the notion that all that mental energy of the writers is retained in those pages and perhaps I can access it from time to time. But then, some of the stupidest people I know can utter some of the most profound inanities. There’s far more to wisdom than what can be held between any two covers. Book learning is only as good as what the reader can absorb.
I often rail on about about the apparent loss of basic sensibility in our contemporary culture. Primal instinct seems to have vanished. The notion of danger is abstract for many folks. Last week’s TV news featured, the same video footage for several nights, a sobbing young lady wailing on about how she had almost been killed and that “They should do something.”
She had been out driving when hit head-on by a runaway truck wheel. It had come unbolted from its mount and run amuck. I’ve seen it happen before. It is wild! Nothing can fling itself along like a renegade wheel. There’s a lot of energy stored in that centrifuge and yes it can be deady. That truck driver received a seven-hundred dollar fine but it was not enough to assuage this ladie’s sense of indignity and personal attack. Look! No-one ventures out onto the road in a cocoon of comfort and divine safety. It is dangerous out there, we are each part of that deadly probability. As the “Victim” of this affront ranted on about being responsible I wanted to ask her when she had last checked the wheel nuts on her own vehicle. It’s all about me and then someday, shit will happen. It is a reality of adulthood, life ain’t fair.
So Christmas approaches, that jaded and bruised commercial season. The real meaning is gone. Once it was about the winter solstice and that the days would soon begin to lengthen, warmth and fertility would come again. The notion of that sustained folks through the winter to come. Then the Christ-child story was sprung on us and that has carried millions forward into the next cycle of life. Now it is about love equalling how much you can spend. It is a gross celebration of excess and over-extension. People become aggressive and even more self-centered. I just left the grocery store where in the name of some Noel solicitation two ambulances and a police car jamed the handicap parking and all their crews in flourescent green jackets stood in the cold winter rain. The way folks were hurtling around in the remaining parking, chances are those emergency vehicles will be necessary before day’s end. I emailed out an old Monty Python mutated Christmas Carol. Some folks were offended, some were delighted. So wishing you all a sense of humour for Christmas and that you can enjoy a few moments of the warm and fuzzy. Bumhug!
Most humans are
never fully present in the now,
because unconsciously they believe
that the next moment must be more
important than this one.
But then you miss your whole life,
which is never not now.
Eckhart Tolle
