Just the wind?

 In Colossians 3, Paul admonishes us to set our mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. That's problematic, because no human is able to directly perceive the things above. Our senses are filled with things that are on earth, and our brains are exquisitely attuned to pleasure. Life here consumes our attention and our affections.

But why shouldn't our lives here be worthy of our full attention? We can't see or clearly imagine the things above. We would be hard-pressed to even name them, although if Paul asked me to make a list, Jesus and God the Father would be right at the top, along with angels hovering in a throne room. I can't picture those angels, however. With their bizarre configurations of eyes and wings, Old Testament angels don't resemble humans. Perhaps it would be easier to meditate on abstractions like faith, hope, and love or to visualize the saints who have gone before.

What's here with me now is a cup of steaming coffee, with cream and sugar. A half-eaten bag of Dorito corn chips, irresistibly crunchy and delicious. A fresh breeze lifting the edges of the curtain at my window. The memory of a doe, heavy with this year's unborn fawn, nosing through the grass outside my gate in search of acorns. A nondescript little flycatcher bouncing along cheerily through the weeds. The sound of a dog barking in the distance.

The wind swaying through the limbs of the junipers outside may be reminiscent of the movement of the Holy Ghost (that's how Jesus would have seen it) but as nearly as I can tell for now, the wind is simply the wind.

Photo: "deer - Newport News Va." by watts_photos is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Can Sophie of the Unsellables Save the World?

Sophie Allsop, Host of the Unsellables

Yesterday was weird because I wanted very much to stay on task and be productive but it was really hard. Every little thing took tremendous effort. 

I suspect this struggle is due to situational depression, caused by the behavior of people who continue to contest the election, the bungled vaccine roll-out, and the general awfulness of life right now. It didn't help that my long-awaited dental appointment was canceled because two people in the office tested positive for COVID.

I had hoped that there would be more people vaccinated by now, and that we'd be progressing towards our new normal, whatever that might be. Instead we're in the middle of a cluster-fuck with more transmissible variants of the virus emerging. Thank you, Donald Trump.

But anger and grief don't actually serve us well in a crisis, do they? On TV, emotions motivate the hero to take decisive and successful action. In real life, emotional turmoil just seems to cause decision paralysis or bad choices. 

Hoarding: Buried Alive disappeared from Prime Video for a few days, and in the time that it was missing, I started watching The Unsellables on YouTube. My husband hates reality TV but I like it – there's a predictable structure which always has a positive outcome (at least in the shows I watch). Sophie the real estate expert looks at the outside of the unsold house, says, "The problem must be inside, and I'm going to find out what it is." She walks through the house and comes up with solutions, which her team then implements, and hey, the house is either sold or they expect it will sell soon. Everyone's happy.

The other thing I love about that show right now is that everybody appears to be doing normal things in a normal economy. Nobody is unemployed, nobody is sick, nobody is wearing masks. It's life the way it used to be, a happy little glimpse of the past where families work together to make change happen and success is possible.

Wouldn't it be great if we had a Pandemic Sophie to guide us to a happier ending? I don't think Joe Biden and his team will be able to function as our guides, not because they are incompetent, but because they will face fierce opposition from people who don't understand science or the necessity of working together to save lives. It's Proud Boys and conspiracy theorists and short-sighted Republicans who stand in the way of the next administration, not peeling wallpaper or purple paint on the walls.

Ecclesiastes 2:26 says that God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy to people who are good in His sight. Right now, we desperately need all three, and perseverance to get us through the next few months.

The End of Shelley and "The Indian Serenade"

Seriously, I am done. I have accumulated an embarrassingly large stack of notes about this poem, and have written my own ghazal; it is time to move on. But first, let me share with some highlights about Percy Bysshe Shelley and his famous poem.

Not everybody liked this poem (I wonder why?):

The absence of concrete imagery in 'The Indian Serenade' has been adversely criticized. The poem's natural world verges on the impalpable: the soft winds, vague perfumes, song of the nightingale, the invisible inaudible stream, faint, die, fall, just as the serenader does in his half-waking ecstasy. It is as if he had awakened from dreams of his lady into a world even more dream-like and indistinct (Park 11).

"In certain critical circles, 'The Indian Serenade' seems to have attained an eminence second only to Kilmer's 'Trees' as a favorite whipping poem" (Levin 305). The New Critics in particular condemned the line, "I die, I faint, I fail" for its "vagueness of description and the direct statement of feeling in poetry" (Abrams and Harpham) – they, as Spock himself might have done, much preferred the Vulcan purity of the objective correlative to all that sloppy, vague emotional verbiage.