Cheers everyone and welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum. Join us, please.
❧
Notes from Below Sea Level
Whispers in the Wind
When I was old enough to read on my own—old enough to pick the book and find a solitary space to call my own—it was to travel. Under the sea more leagues than I could imagine, stowed away on a ship in search of pirate treasure, to the red planet or center of the earth. It was to small towns in the rural South where mockingbirds were sacrosanct or good men hard to find. To the great European cities where intrigue waited down the darkest alleys in the roughest parts of the poorest neighborhoods or one’s skill with a sword was second only to honor among friends. Such was the life of someone born to a small town on the Gulf Coast where physical labor and hard scrabble days awaited just beyond schooling.
And then my father decided to take the family on summer vacations. Two weeks on the road in the Volkswagen van to nearly every state in the continental US, Mexico, and Canada. Why this tradition started when I was six is a mystery to me; where the money came from is even more mysterious. But every summer until I was in the eighth grade, we would pack up the coolers and backpacks and hit the road for long days on the road. The very first trip we took was to the Grand Canyon. The last to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. My father favored the Southeast, though, and the majority of those trips ended us in the high country where the dry air and sandy soil satisfied my need for something other than the marshy lands of my hometown.
After trying college for a semester and then dropping out to work, I used my time and money to travel further. The great cities mapped out in my youth—New York and Chicago and Los Angeles, Paris and Rome, Cairo and Casablanca and all those places in between. There was a time of island hopping through the Mediterranean and the Carribean and then forays into a shuttered Eastern Europe. Still later, it was again to the Southeast, to smaller places and hidden towns less likely to seduce the casual traveler. By my late 20s and early 30s there was a place I habitually visited, though it took years to process and understand its pull.
E. S. Curtis (1904): Canyon de Chelly – Navajo. Seven riders on horseback and dog trek against background of canyon cliffs.
Tucked in the Northeast corner of Arizona is Canyon de Chelly, a place that can nurse a bruised soul, a place where my injured heart could safely graze and heal at nature’s pace. Since first visiting on the advice of a photographer friend, I returned periodically and been fortunate enough to be guided through some of its more hallowed ground. It is a place—for me—where even a wizened white man can find solace in the grace of brown gods unknown. This canyon (less famed and less colorful) is where my mind sometimes recedes when I need solitude from a brutish, indifferent world. This place is the image I recall when trying to put shape to an ephemeral feeling or solidify amorphous, inarticulate ideas I can’t seem to hold long enough to map their contours and define their edges.
Like most angles of attack I take when rummaging through emotional detritus, this tale isn’t about that canyon in Arizona or even my inability to understand or articulate what I am going through. It’s about my search for moral standing in the cyclone of circumstances that define my life and my relationship to those people who are woven into the fabric of my being. I have reached that time in my life when I attend more funerals than weddings or baptisms, when arguments can now be seen as minor squabbles, when the clarity of hindsight compensates for failing sight, and when priorities take on a luster of universality, freed of the mundane and inane and pettiness that blindered so much of my youth. As if this long journey were but a circle, it is time for me to again pack up a cooler, stuff my backpack full, and point that van toward places unknown.
Time, ever the judge of humanity’s ultimate worth, has spoken. And it’s about love—my tale, that is—and the wending road it takes. It is about each chapter in our own book, each secret rendezvous and broken heart, each birth and death, each tiny space of solitude and peace we find along the way.
❧
My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
❧
❧
☕️
Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?