A long day

And the best part of the day was walking around the golf course: I walk, Jami runs and meets me, and then we walk on together. What a wonderful Sunday: we went to 1st Presbyterian here in Durham and heard a wonderful sermon from Joe Harvard: God is an extravagant disperser of seed - everything so Whitmanesque lately, but no wonder that God's abundance is without calculation, that it goes everywhere, without measure. We live in a world where many people don't believe that: wanting to believe that the necessities of life are scarce. I say, only because we make them scarce through our anxieties and fear, when we act out of self preservation. We seem culturally wired to disbelieve Jesus' message of abundance and forgiveness, instead believing it is better to hold grudges and squirrel away all we have. For this we go to war, we build fences, we engage in security theatre and polarizing rhetoric. An objective view, a nuanced view - these are drowned out, brushed aside.
Has it ever been otherwise?
Today, after church we went to see Hellboy II. What a great film. There's the sense in this film that humanity never learns its lesson. We found ourselves drawn to Hellboy and his elven protagonist. If demon spawn and elf-brood and goblin can get along, why can't we? Why can't we care about the planet we live on? This trend in super villains, where they've got a good point, is an improvement over the black/white, good/evil dichotomy that's prevailed for so long.
And then, after the movie, for some reason I thought the reception for the vice-moderator was today (it's next Saturday) and we drove from the theatre in Morrisville into Raleigh, only to find an empty parking lot and the doors to the church closed. I would like to blame the weight watchers diet: that it leaves me insufficiently fueled to run my complex brain; but I would have made this mistake on a full stomach - and last night, I did make this mistake on a full stomach - or moderately full.
After we returned home, we went for that walk around the golf course, in the woods, among the trees, on a wide graveled path. All around me nature was green and bright. I am amazed at how beautiful the world is, even close at hand: how water trickling in a culvert among rocks can be transcendent. Whitman and Merleau Ponty ring in my ears: I'm in my body and in the world, moving through time, and I exist in this place, facing this horizon.
Tuesday I will be received into presbytery. And this moment and that moment are tied together. I will stand before my colleagues in ministry knowing and not knowing, forgetting and remembering.
When the long day is over I put my tired legs under the covers and cherish the presence of my wife. Together we laugh. Hearty Rabelaisian laughs.

Along the Eno

The Eno is a river a few miles north of us; part of its course is a state park where you can walk along riverside trails. I and the most beautiful woman in the world took a walk along the Eno's banks Monday, a fine way to spend the last day of the Memorial Day Weekend.
We saw turtles, old brick structures [an old pump house, not pictured), snakes and wonderful rock formations.
The day was mild and I would have had no exertion except for my need to carry binoculars, camera, and Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology, a Bible, Basil Buntings Poems, and a sketchbook in my blue "Tampa Maid" bag. Plus I was over dressed: the better to ward off unwelcome insect pests and their pesky bites. Jami traveled light and expressed some concern that I might be better off without the blue bag; that I might be cooler wearing shorts and a t-shirt. But no, veteran of riverside excursions me, I sauntered on.
The Eno is a beautiful river to walk along. Its waters are easy going, with great placid stretches. Today we walked to Bob's Hole. Previously we'd visited Bobbit's Hole, a wide place in the river, with gurgling rapids downstream. When we saw it, Bobbit's Hole seemed a magical place. We sat for a while on a bench the park provided along the bank. Bob's hole, perhaps would offer some of the same wonder.
We walked along the river. We crossed under the bridge to the road. We picked our way through rocks along the bank while traffic rumbled speedily overhead. Some stretches of river are full of algae, and green sprigs of grass and trees sprout from sandbars. At one point we saw a fish, alone, swimming upstream beside the bank. Mostly we saw turtles, holding their place against the current. Straddling a fallen tree in our path, Jami saw a small frog, invisible almost as it nearly matched the ground cover in texture and color.
The light bounced off the river and shimmered on the underside of overhanging branches, and its dull opaque surface was broken by amber shadows that revealed the bottom's rocks and sand. Whenever I looked back I saw that the trail was different in its aspects and mystery - so much so that I wondered if I'd noticed anything at all.
We crossed Pea Creek, a small tributary strewn with rocks. Jami nimbly crossed from rock to rock, while I took a more circular route where rocks seemed closely spaced. As I crossed the Pea I thought about a time 28 years ago when I hiked deep into the Rockies at the continental divide. Tenderfoot that I was, I made quick work of rocks across streams and at one point jumped across a small gap in a beaver dam. At the time I only had 150 pounds on my 5'10" frame. Now with 238 lbs. and 48 years old, I considered how much limberness I'd lost to time. At one point I handed Jami the Tampa Maid bag and hunched from one rock over another braced like a sumo wrestler, pivoting my leg over the gap. My leaping days are behind me.
If we're ever attacked by zombies or velociraptors I'm toast.
Not far from where we forded the Pea, we clambered up a rock, and as we stopped, I looked down at the river and saw a snake, brightly colored and lazing in the shadowy current. I have no idea what it is, but I'm sure it's poisonous, a copperhead or water moccasin, perhaps [ Jami informs me today, 5/29/2008, after checking the NC extension site and Wikipedia, that it's an Eastern Milk snake, and that it eats mice and other snakes - not poisonous]. It was beautiful. We took photos, messmerized. Later Jami would describe it as a foot long and I would aver that it was 5 feet, at least. I'm sure that it's in the middle.
As we continued up and down this exposed rock, I thought about how snakes like to sun themselves on rocks such as this.
Eventually we made it to Bob's Hole. It was a wide place on the river, but it lacked the charm of the Bobbit Hole. It did have a wonderful rock at one end, white and root tangled, standing 20 feet out of the river on the bank. The park provided no bench; no campsite was nearby. A small bed of rocks gurgled at the entrance to the hole.

It's November now

It's November now - Fall, the season where we celebrate the Autumn of humanity, where Adam and Eve, disAbled raised Cain. Enoch already they flooded, Aunty Deluvianne, arc de triomphefetted their babble, and ur-Urian unmenschenables adequate sacrifices of gout, frankenstein and merv. It came about in those days, along the river Euphrates, **** said "lights" and divided the lithe from the awkwardly moving amphibious landing goal tendering tofu wabohuites of Kenosha, Wisk Cosine. Sines and nomine worked wonders and all the saints weened hollow days and pumped full knights, rooked and bishop pricked fungible goods and evens, getting. And then arose a pharaoh that knew not where the remote was, not the remotest idea, and **** spoke to Moscowitz burning brush saying, "go tell that that that that that that," and so it was, and came to pass, and happened, that from that day till this and even till this day, that wherever that that that that is that-ed, that those that that that that even till this day and a day and half a day hoist a moist frothy two and a half eight and a quarter before half and a hilt halter top topped unter den linden and through the hills to grossmutter's hause wir knock dame treffen hen arf!
And then arose Shamgard who killed six full days of time with a hang nail.
Deb, the Canaan knischites bee, hailed Jael time and her trepanatorish arts, pegged barracks heading home.
Judge for yourself and they did as each did what was left of their own time and righted themselves acquitted. What the ex-honor ate.