Sisyphus

There is a place,
Where my patches, my poultices
Find no purchase before
The rains fall.
The flood saws away
My impermanent marks
So I scratch,
I sow the seed,
I salve the scars.

Yet again,
The torrent erodes,
My dreams swept down stream.
So again I take up shovel and rake to fill
The deep slashes in my green field.

Not again.
Robbed by the rain overnight,
My work wrecked,
I will not win.

God help me
I cannot stop.

Days Slipping Away

Walden Pond

Too quickly the days slip away into yesterdays. Looking at this blog today I realized I had not been here in more than a month. Sometimes it is the journal of my inner life and some times I just have to leave it alone. There is a great deal of change and uncertainty in my life these past months and many times I am too worn to stand the thought of even another moment in front of a computer screen trying to get my thoughts together. These are trying times and the decisions I must make will have long term consequences. Once again I am torn by the conflict between my conscience and my checkbook, between security and uncertainty. But we are all in good hands.

When life weighs too heavily I fall back on the comfort, the consolation of a good book. I am currently rereading The Hobbit. Gandalf does not seem so much like the serious wizard here as in the later books. I also recently re-read the Lords of The Rings trilogy and watched all the movies over again. I first read through the series many years ago when I was too young a reader to really understand the magnitude of what I was reading. I was spurred to catch up on these old friends by a posting by Deb On The Run here in which she mentioned Tom Bombadil. Finishing The Fellowship Of The Ring then watching the movie led to disappointment. The movie seemed not to be as good as I had remembered. With The Two Towers it was the opposite. The movie and the book were both engaging.

One of the things I find most interesting about Tolkien is that these books are just part of a much wider and deeper invention of his imagination. And he was a very well respected scholar who wrote one of the most seminal and important papers about the great Beowulf poem (one of my favorite literary works). Tolkien was one of the first to treat Beowulf as a work of art and not just an artifact of history.

I also recently finished The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. First novels just don’t get much better than this. This story is so well written and rings so true it feels like an autobiography and it packs a powerful emotional wallop. As a bit of a (hack) writer myself it’s always a moment to savor when you come across such a craftsman. From the very first paragraph Hosseini pulled me in and I read in every free moment.

I also just finished Gone For Soldiers by Jeff Shaara. I’ve read two of his other books and found then to be good solid writing but with no surprises. This book is a re-imagining of the Mexican-American War through the eyes of (for the most part) Gen. Winfield Scott and Capt. Robert E. Lee. What I found most interesting about the book is how many characters show up here who went on to play pivotal roles in The Civil War. Besides Scott and Lee there is Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, James Longstreet, George Meade, George Pickett and Joe Johnston. I also learned a great deal about this war that finalized most of our nation’s permanent boundaries. Mexico was forced to cede Texas, New Mexico and California. This was Manifest Destiny in its ugliest form.

This is also the war to which Thoreau so strenuously objected in “Civil Disobedience.” Sorry for this tangent but Thoreau is a personal favorite of mine. Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Thoreau:

“He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely no doubt for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature.... No truer American existed than Thoreau.”

Thoreau’s Walden is one the great books. The passage below is some my favorite writing:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it.”

These words never fail to inspire me even when I fall so short of the ideal.

In honor of Thoreau here are a few recent photos of our flora and fauna.

Almost looks like an alien landscape but it's just the tidal flat when the tide is out.

Random Photos

This is just a random selection of photos. I will be back to writing later this week.

More Disney Madness

Visions of Disney

Down Time

We will be gone on a Disney cruise to the Bahamas for the next few days. Please add us to your prayers that we might return safe and refreshed.

Mercy For Monsters?

Warning: This entry addresses issues you may find very offensive.




I learned today that a man who molested his niece while visiting her family here pled guilty and received a sentence of 40 years in prison and will have to serve the first fifteen years with no possibility of parole. This sentence seems grossly inadequate for a man who repeatedly sodomized and raped his teenage niece. He then used the classic child molester defense and said she forced herself on him. According to him if she had not been so sexually aggressive none of this would have happened.

As bad as this guy sounds there are others who are much worse. In the county just north of hear a young boy was kidnapped and then molested by a man and his father while the mother/wife looked on and derived her own sexual pleasure. All this when the young boy has a plastic bag over his head. His body was found dumped not far from the scene of the crime. None of these monsters has gone to trial.

About five years ago a man who lived directly across the street from me pled guilty to 13 counts of child molestation and received an 80 year sentence on each charge. When caught he owned up to what he had done and made a full confession. This man was my neighbor. Hiding in plain sight. And there are always more. More horror stories. More very real monsters.

In cases like this I find it particularly hard to stick to my Christian beliefs. Having been on the receiving end of a great deal of abuse as a child I know my reaction is skewed, that it awakens demons in me best left alone. Part of me cries out with an eye for an eye, to make the punishment fit the crime. In fact many times I have said that if I discover that anyone has done anything like this to a member of my family I will settle the score myself and the courts be damned. I take no offense in knowing that while in prison child molesters often discover how it feels to be raped and sodomized. They stay on the lowest level of the inmate/prison hierarchy and find no peace, no solace.

Where is our God? Does the stench of this inhumanity not rise up to offend him? Is there really any shared humanity with these monsters? Are they really the likeness and image of our creator?

Or am I not asking the right questions? Perhaps I am not looking closely enough in the mirror. What does this rage, this cry for no mercy say about me? Is the stench of my sins any less offensive?

I have been many times been loved when I was all but unlovable. My actions shamed me and left me undeserving of mercy. But even during those times when the demons in me went unchecked I still found the hand of love extended to me. Even then I was not measured by my inhumanity but by my humanity, my potential for good.

It is easy for me to hate these men, yet we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. To judge not lest we be judged. Some say to hate the sin but love the sinner. Who does this hatred hurt? Not the monsters, they have no idea I even exist. It is an acid that eats away at the goodness in me, making room for even more hatred, less room for genuine compassion. Lord help me.

Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat

Bob Dylan stopped by the house last night. I wish. Actually this is me playing with the camera and a borrowed flash. For this photo, following instructions from the photography class instructor, I had bubble wrap over the flash to see what if any effect it would have. That wasn't quite enough to satisfy my curiosity so I also put bubble wrap in front of the lens.

I am however wearing the Bob Dylan t-shirt I bought when my wife and I saw him and Willie Nelson on the same bill at Metropolitan Park in Jacksonville. The hat came from the Animal Kingdom at Disney World. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat is on Dylan's Blonde On Blonde album.

I think it is a good example of how photos can open more questions than they answer.