The Orbiting Seasons of Life

 A lady from my past reached across Facebook Messenger tonight. We used to play duets at church, gossamer pieces of music. I was the flute, she the pianist. I was not worthy of her gifts. She is one who has that uncanny ability to embellish anything on the score. She puts the liquid in between the pieces, so it all flows and fills the room with joy. I asked her how she came to be so fluent. She said it was sheer necessity, in a small church where they needed a pianist. With no real experience, she was thrown into a situation where it was sink or swim. So swimming was the order of the day. Over time, and with more and more confidence, she learned how to innovate and add chords to the simple hymns. There are people who technically know how to play the piano, who thrill with their immense skill. Then there are those who have it deep in their soul, going way beyond skill or training. Alice was, is, such a player. Any of us whose ears were graced with her gift will never forget her.

In this day of social media overkill, there are some good parts...where we get to cross paths with old friends. To consider the days, the folks that have meant much to us. 

But the bad part: I think our brains are filling up with too much easily-gained information, so we're forgetting how to actually think. Our wires and synapses are getting shortened artificially because we don't take the time to process, to wander into a library, smell the old books, sit down and read something that isn't on a glowing piece of glass. It has been said that we have a capacity for just-so-many B-B's in our brains, and that when the bowl gets full they start falling out...and that there's no accounting for which ones escape the hatch. We laugh, but I'm afraid it's true. And now we're putting a whole lot of really tiny B-B's in there and they're starting an avalanche.

I recall days, not so very long ago, when I wasn't compelled to check my phone 200 times, when I wasn't worried about missing a call (and therefore missing a client). Survival was simpler, though maybe harsher. We had less, but that was okay. We didn't really know we had less and it didn't matter. Afternoons with a friend, with a dozen kids climbing all over, coffee and Kool-Aid, sticky walls and puppy hair everywhere. We thought it'd never end, and some days you looked blissfully to the day that it would, thinking it would be so much easier then. It never is, and there's always a trade-off. 

Downy heads and tired, sleepy eyes...how did God know how much we'd need grandchildren? They're ours, body and soul; we read, sing, play, feed them, then they go back home, just in time. The moon rises and I remember it again...