Everything felt rotten today. Terie went to the ER with severe spinal pain, and Bruce almost ended up there, too. I was stressed out anyway, because I’ve been trying to get the Band Festival poster to the printer for the past three days. There were last-minute revisions to the sponsor list, plus I’ve had pressing commercial deadlines rubbing my nerves raw. A local reporter keeps calling about doing a feature on my painting, Spellbound By Brass. In a momentary lapse of discipline I say, “If I don’t get this poster right, there will be nothing to toot my horn about.”
Damn… tripped up again by an illusion of chaos and the sense of disorder. Ralph Waldo reminds me that, “There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe. All is system and gradation.” I must believe it’s true, even on days like today. I must have full faith in a divine order—the reality and foundation that underlies this “kingdom of illusions.” I must never think I’m too busy not to keep this reality before me, hour by hour. “Whatever games are played with us,” Emerson writes, “we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth… and taste the real quality of existence, as in our employments, which only differ in the manipulations, but express the same laws; or in our thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no ice-creams.” Why is it so difficult for me to “see God face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature” when in the jaws of masticating days such as these—not on a day when it’s easy, but on a day when it matters?
This line of thinking takes me back to my birthday, flying from Dallas to Detroit, unable to pull my eyes away from the images far below my window’s point of view. I was expecting to review my notes from three days of high-intensity exposure to powerful speakers, significant motivators all, but I couldn’t ignore the sights under the speeding craft, the living plains and wooded river bottoms as we crossed the heart of my beloved motherland. I could see the hand of Nature in the centuries-old patterns of meandering watercourses and how the farmers had endeavored to exploit the riches of her fertile, changing designs—everywhere, the evidence of God’s magnificent Kosmos, and it caused my soul to sing. It triggered previous experiences of knowing what is real, in contrast to what I’ve conditioned myself over my life to think is real. I wanted to have that profound knowledge stay with me always, but I recognized it would pass, so I tried to hold on to one point of reality that might “stick” with me—that I am loved, that I can love in return, and that I can be in that reality no matter what is going on around me, no matter what conditions or circumstances challenge my thoughts or emotions. I wondered if I could hold on to that idea, and not fail to safeguard it, as Tolstoy’s Olenin had failed when he returned from nature to the Cossack village. And so I prayed, as I watched America sliding by, knowing there would be times like now, when my resilience to illusion would be shallow in the face of daily influences.