Once a month or so, the secretive wrap comes off, revealing our 17 foot, full-color, kaleidoscopic, all-dancing time-traveling dream machine, The Great Escape. Hitching it up to our Toyota RAV4, we take on the great outdoors for Cinemascope RV adventures.
Hospital staff lunch room hierarchy.
This sort of behavior just does not appear to be normal. Even if you turn the picture upside down. Boulder, CO
Her first ballet recital: Justin and Susannah with dancing daughter, June.
Lacking long crane-legs or giraffe necks of animals, we humans climb atop sticks-and-tin construction to delight in Creation.
Still, beast views sometimes seem a cut above our own. Crystal Cove, CA
My day. Your day, too?
You know your real estate company is in trouble when it has to put ITSELF up for sale!
In the ER, getting Jackie checked out for possible gall bladder problems. Seeing folks who are suffering is always troubling. In additions to his obvious injuries, this fellow sitting next us had no legs below his knees. So he probably didn’t fall off a ladder. At least, I hope not.
A New Years Day stroll on Laguna Beach, a setting sun, a much-relished camping escape turned into a drone buzz-match. A law enforcement officer suddenly chastened a newbie drone pilot filming his family doing surfside acrobatics.
“Take it down!” he was ordered. Public beach, I suppose, still off-limits to drones.
Which is what I had wanted to say during the whole episode. Take it down.
Fences make good neighbors. They define personal turf; leave my stuff alone.
Drones break the rules of fences. Shouldn’t my private space be protected from uninvited intrusion?
I know, I know. Jesus had no turf of his own, “no place to lay His head.” Foxes had dens and birds had nests, but not him.
And, presumably, not us any more.
Giving up personal space and privacy for a just cause is a noble thing. But I’m not so sure we should welcome it as a norm.
When will the next drone-weaponized photograph of me picking my nose appear on Facebook?
Or far worse.
Bagpipes are gifted with two voices. The melancholy drone reminds us of its earthbound connection, a track laid down to attach us to the real world.
When the pipe lets loose its second, shrill and ethereal voice, we are lifted to high places, released from earthly fetters.
We are mesmerized by the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” On bagpipes, it stops us with its wondrous melody, the drone anchoring the soaring tune to earth.
The day before Easter, a dozen bagpipers let go the voices of their instruments, blending their earthy drone and heavenly pitch. The closer they marched, the sharper their voices split the air. They stopped directly in front of me, kilts and caps and stockings coming to an abrupt halt. As they neatly turned, something dangling from the waist of a kilt before me caught my eye. An incongruent plastic water bottle glistened against the tidy, plaid pleats.
The unexpected water bottle caught my full attention.
I’m not sure exactly how an unanticipated water bottle allowed me to enter fully into the event. But the costumes, the bagpipes, and their dual voices suddenly became uniquely “mine”—the music’s beauty distilled through the humor of a lowly, so misplaced, bottle of water. It was my own snapshot, my insider view.
Then, fewer than twenty-four hours later, in the church service I attended, Easter was everywhere. It was in the one hundred-strong choir. It was in their voices, like the spirited high voice of yesterday’s bagpipes. It was in the orchestra. Like the bagpipe drone, the instruments grounded the cosmic heaven-and-earth Easter story.
Easter is huge; it is profound. But I had a problem. Where was today’s “water bottle” moment for me? Hearing the earth-shaking Easter story one more time did not make it “mine.” It was routine. The cosmic message was too vast, too big to grasp. The heaven and earth connection was too abstract.
I needed a hook to connect to the profound message. It was too enormous to get my head around.
Until, that is, sitting there in the pew, I recalled my own recent shortcomings. Now they fell on me—cold and stinging like hail. When I thought about them, and owned them, my failures seemed big as the universe.
Raw nerves were exposed. My humanity embarrassed me. It was personal.
So finally, my Easter water-bottle moment had arrived. My humiliation hung on me like that bottle. It was so out-of-place. So obvious. And I had to own it.
The wayward water bottle! My own missteps! Suddenly, Easter came alive. I badly needed that Easter Message to meet my newly-admitted condition.
It would. It did. And that alone, lifted me.
