Sometimes Travel Requires a Donkey

                                            Sometimes Travel Requires a Donkey

 

And here we awake in the wee hours of the morning to a cup of tea or a pot of coffee safe in the knowledge that no one yet knows us as we ascribe to the ritual that got us out of bed in the first place. We are, social beings but not yet- not yet. Here it is assumed that this tidbit of time will forever place us on the proper course and help us to dictate how to approach the motions of the new day with grace and poise. It is here, at that moment that we should ask the donkey how he feels about our life. Don’t have a donkey you say. That’s okay; you can buy one for about three fifty-seven on Amazon. Of course it won’t be a real donkey but I guarantee a read that may change your morning ritual if even just a tad so that not only are your senses soothed, but that ever present notion that spurs you to do something more is met as well.

 

Robert Lewis Stevenson drank coffee from the cup of the same dregs that we all do, tea from a broken pot and smoked a pipe that was adrift in memories nine times ten all the while dreaming of a well known scheme that he eventually put into practice if only to show the rest of us that it could be done. Stevenson drove a donkey into the Italian countryside and found himself in the process. Here it is that his coffee tasted better for one, yes. And yet it was his mornings that for the first time discovered became the pivot of a true and better life and allowed him to become something more than he had become. For once he had become human and in this newfound glory he finally found himself alive. The book is “Stevenson’s travels with a Donkey,” and the better part of his valor is ensconced in the value of the animal with which he chose to travel.

 

I only suggest that you read the book, not buy a donkey. Italy is but a stones throw by air I know but it is not necessary to wind up on her shores to find the essence of what he did. Still, the reality is as poignant as his need to discover something above and out of ourselves while there is still time. Time to converse without looking for an answer, time to see the form of a person while that person lives and breathes in our world, even a time to love another simply because they are.

 

Hardly the things of the present moment in which we live and moreover not the things we generally speak of over morning coffee but these things should be spoken nonetheless and at every given moment that time pursues. Should it take a donkey to get us there then that is what we buy as the element of a donkey in the Alps lends itself to a wider vision than what we normally see on the road these days. I’m thinking of truck-wide RV’s the length of a little league field and filled with television, microwaves and showers with or without potty’s. I must admit, as a writer, none of those sound appealing to either myself or the Alps. They and I deserve better, we clamor for the poetic and if either one of us were to take the high road here I believe we would choose the donkey. Robert did it in simpler times and maybe it is up to us to simplify the times. Maybe that donkey can save our lives. Either way, its just a walk in the park.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Leisure and of Liberty

                                          On Leisure; and of Liberty

 

 

There is a book out there that may have sparked the writing of many books about the same subject. But it didn’t. As such, it retained the qualities of the kind of book that most men would like to read but never found the time to. It is called “Leisure, the basis of culture.” The title alone makes you wonder why it has not been widely spread among the America’s.

 

But I have an answer to that. Of course I do and one you may not like. It is because we have no sense of true liberty anymore that we cannot even take the leisure of a good book that tells us what leisure is even about. Give me the definition of a conundrum and I will give the answer that answers why you have never read this book.

 

For leisure to take place there must of necessity be in place the right frame of mind to allow it to be in the first place. And this we call liberty. Liberty of conscience or you might rephrase this to mean liberty of time and even liberty of spirit. It is all one in the same but it is not the same for you and I who have to live it out independent of each other. And here it might seem that I am putting yet another time constraint on you to try and find the time to adhere to a little leisure.

 

I am not. The business of the farm, the job, the home dictates what time you really have and yet, for all that its worth, I offer a hope that lives within those very constraints as the book can be read in only a few short hours.

 

 But no matter the book, the time is what is most pressing and is actually what I mean to discuss. It is in time that we can discuss liberty and the means to get us from here to there. In that time is found the liberty to do what we ought to, the means by which she, liberty, is fostered and the wherewithal to see it discovered properly, like gentleman if not even unto like the scholars. It can be done with or without you but I would rather you be in than out of this one sir. Commit to liberty and she will bring you leisure. And here is where I see the whole thing played out.

 

Liberty is none other than the self in possession of self-realization. It is the ability to choose what we ought to do and not as we like in our given circumstance. Now, this is a hard thing to bear for a man, to do as we ought and not as we like. But it is necessary if we are to gain access to truth, which is the reason that leisure exists. You see, they run hand in hand. Liberty of spirit allows us to enter in to leisure and leisure propels us to enter into the something more, the essence of a life well lived.

 

It is in this life well lived that we encounter that which matters most to us: family, work.

And yet this is the exact moment that we should retreat into leisure since leisure exacts nothing from us than the being unto being. It is in the way that we understand things that things are known to us, and if in woodwork, you find the time to nurture your family than that is something you should not live without. If I find the time to write fiction have I left my family alone for so long that they are forgotten? Certainly not, it is a balance between what I have to do and what I should be doing, and though the two are entwined does not make them opposed at all but rather makes them whole, as long as the one for my sanity is what makes her sane and whole.

 

So there it lays, liberty, to do what we ought, leisure to do what we should. Take full advantage then and make the two things wholesome and alive. It is the least you can do for your family and the best of that is given to God.

The Soul of Francis Thompson

                                           The Soul of Francis Thompson

 

 

It is not hard to find the soul of a man. Live his life but once and you have it cold. That dark and mysterious place we call the mind is but the affluence of those allowed to think at the present time. We never know until called home just how many lives were effected. And yet coming home is the first thing on our minds.

 

Take Francis Thompson for a model if you will. Bereft of all meaning and yet his life had one purpose; to save you. And yet I think that serving him would have been the better part of valor. Else wise you and I are both damned if his life had no import. Why- because he was better than us, in everything besides sports and/or, lesser games of chance.

 

 

Thompson had a particular purpose in life such as you and I do not. He was alive for just one reason and that reason was reason enough. If you know nothing of his life than this alone will suffice to say of him. He was a poet first and foremost and an addict secondarily. All the same family of disease, but none so great that he never shrunk from either call of duty.

 

He wrote and was loved- he fell, and was hated for the failure, same as I; same as you. When down we recognize true friendships neither based on gain or loss and yet the funny thing is about loss, it truly can become a gain, that is should you wish it to be. They say that which does not kill you only makes you stronger. I suffer through that vapid sphere and state the fact that whatever tried to kill you is even better off dead than you are.

 

What I long to feel is sunshine on my shoulder, breathe in my share of air and share that which is of the utmost of importance in this world; honesty. For honesty breeds integrity and integrity breeds the best of us. Thompson was a breed alone and he died as such. Thompson was set apart for a particular mission that few of us could endure. Francis Thompson- is a saint.

 

Whatever we long to feel and whatever our hatred in the heart will never amount to the love that he felt for the Word and shall certainly never encapsulate now that he is gone. But for us that remain to read his work there shall never be or ever was, a more fitting mind than Thompson among us. The God of mercy read his work and of this I am sure, He found himself laughing at every turn, of the good book upside down.