October Musings

Dear friends,

Don't miss October.  With all the distractions and vicissitudes of life, please don't miss it.  I asked the Great One not to let ME miss it.  This little ditty combines some of my childhood memories and my current observations.  Hope it makes you smell the dry leaves and feel the nippy wind.  Get outside!  Embrace it before it's gone...

 Sweet October

In October I am five, crunching cross' the sidewalks

Pulling up my itchy, wrinkled tights

Mary janes are scuffed from skipping round and round the block

Spitting out the skins from apple bites

In October I love wind, blowing way' my sorrow

Pumpkins smile despite their pending doom

Library smells of chestnuts and the books I'll borrow

Swoosh of leaves succumbing to the broom

In October strength is givn' for November's losses

Hearts can store up all that's warm and gold

The axis of the Earth is daylight's restless posse

Chlorophyll's auctioneer barks finally "Sold!"

In October tea tastes better, pies' a wonder

Perfection's found in street boys' football spirals

Brides and grooms forbid to ever "put asunder"

Microbes fear the latest anti virals

Hear October! I am grown, but still I crunch

Cross' the sidewalk, through the spunky breeze

In the sorrows, in the sweetness, in the autumn

My hope clings brilliant, like the maple trees

Your friend on the pilgrim road,

Loriann

Places vs. Things

Dear friends,

I’ve always said if I struck it rich (as Jeeves would say “the contingency is a remote one, sir”), I would love to travel extensively.  I’m not the least bit interested in owning a big house, driving a fancy car, or wearing designer clothes.  It’s not that I’m ultra humble, or that I don’t like nice things, but I’m pretty content with the “stuff” of my life.  Sometimes I walk around my house in utter astonishment muttering “thank you Jesus, for my palace!”  I recognize the obvious disparity between my possessions and those of ninety percent of the world.  On my best days I’m practically overwhelmed with gratitude. 

No, what I covet on my worst days and dream of on my better ones is to see the places that decorate this blue ball in the universe.  Mind you, I’ve been blessed with more travel than the average Joe.  Back in my career days with Reading Rainbow I traversed the big 48, and even spent a month in Hawaii.  I wondered at the waterfowl and complex ecosystem of the mighty Chesapeake Bay.  I watched in awe as millions of bats left their guano laden cave at dusk to consume billions of mosquitos somewhere near the Mexican border.  I hiked the Highline Trail in Glacier National Park Montana on the 4^th of July and stood face to face with a papa big horn sheep and his harem.  I cried overlooking a vast chasm on the way from Estes Park, Colorado to Aspen.  I’ve met interesting people, from a model train expert in New Jersey to the pig wrastlers at the Pomona County Fair in California.  I stood on the eye of the Statue of Liberty while it was being restored back in the 1980’s. 

Places have personalities.  Much like people, you have to get to know them a little bit to find out the lovely things about them.  Some wow you immediately, some grow on you, and some just aren’t your kind of ice cream.  But I sure would love to try a few more flavors.

For example, I want to visit Dulwich College in England where Ernest Shackleton’s 23 foot whaler, the James Caird is on display.  (That open wooden boat travelled 800 miles in the Arctic Sea and was a vital tool in the rescue of Shackleton’s men from their ordeal near the frozen South Pole – but that’s another story).  In all my travels I still haven’t seen the Grand Canyon.  More than anything, I want to set my feet in the Holy City of Jerusalem.  That, my friends, is one piece of real estate lots of people seem to want to get their hands on…

Alas, I haven’t struck it rich, and right about now with 3 teenagers in the house and the ongoing recovery from a wildly perilous car accident, I won’t be trompsing about in my wayfaring boots anytime soon. 

There is one place that captures my heart more than any other.  That place is heaven.  Some of my my most dearly held secrets contain my thoughts about that celestial homeland.  Our ancient father Abraham’s feelings about that promised land mirror my own: “For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”  Hebrews 11:10  The appeal of heaven is hard to overstate.  John the Revelator tries to use human language to describe something that defies words. Images foreign to our 21^st century imaginations seem weird.  Some folks would have you believe that heaven is not really a place, but a state of mind.  I don’t buy that one.  Rivers, cities, streets…these are all the stuff of places.  No, it will be a real, solid, substantive whereabouts alright.  This world will seem like the wispy shadow land.  That place will team with life and love and freedom. (For a great fictional story about the “realness” of heaven, try C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce).

In the long run, it’s places I prefer to things.  But honestly, I couldn’t care less if heaven were a barn.   The appeal of heaven is my Jesus.  Without Him, it’s not heaven at all.  The most beautiful place in the world is hopelessly boring and sterile without the key ingredient: Relationship.  And eternally speaking, relationship with God is the passport to the wonder and joy of heaven. 

For now, I’m hoping to make this broken place just a wee bit better for some of the other dwellers on this planet.  But when my ticket home comes through, watch out for the woman that’s like a “short, brunette streak of light” (to paraphrase Cary Grant in “Arsenic and Old Lace”).  My pilgrim road days will be over.  My true travellin’ days will have just begun!   

Your friend on the pilgrim road,

Loriann