My 9th grade geometry teacher used this quote to explain his style of teaching. Truer words are not oft spoken.
“I tell you one thing; if you learn it by yourself, if you have to get down and dig for it, it never leaves you. It stays there as long as you live because you had to dig it out of the mud before you learned what it was.”
~Addie Norton
Blah.
Snow gets old– after two days without electricity, going to bed when the sun goes down (ok, not quite, but going to bed early), our only heat the wood stove and the cold sun.
The adventure continues; perhaps Ben will come tomorrow. But will I be free to pick him up?
“The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.”-M. L’Engle (A Circle of Quiet)
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Email is a deceiver. It cries, “You have a hundred friends who want to talk to you soon, today, right now!”
“Stop what you’re doing and look at me. Read.
“Read. Reading is good for your soul.”
But we were, all of us, deceived. For while we read, the world spun on, irregardless of the import of our emails, the number of our digital friends, the turnaround time between send and receive.
What if once, I tried talking with my neighbors next door rather than the girl across the globe? What if once, I stayed where I was and listened, breathing deeply the air that is here and now, not infinity and beyond? What if once, just one, I tried to care– care about something, anything.
Is it possible to resist the winter that grinds me to cynicism? How is one strong enough to bear such a burden? Is there no one to mediate, no one to help shoulder the load?