I'm at the airport waiting for my flight to Honolulu. A lot of people think that I'm not coming back from the islands. Admittedly, I didn't make it a point to tell everyone when I was going back to Utah, and also, for the most part, I made it a point to stay silent about my future residence after I finished this project. But to end the uncertainty, at least for those who follow my blog, I will say that I do have a ticket back to Utah. Perhaps defeating my whole explanation though, I haven't, however, determined yet if I will use it.
So, the airport. This gives me time to write. First of all, I want to briefly address why I didn't post anything yesterday. Yesterday was Sunday. Oh, sabbath day, how you keep me in fond perplexity. As Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down (as most notably performed by Johnny Cash) puts it, "there's something in a Sunday that makes the body feel alone."
Isn't that reason enough to take a day off from the burdens of the internet? I apologize. Sometimes I get a little too reflective and I simply don't know what to do with myself.
I did write though, as I wrote the Sunday before that, and the one before that, but I didn't post it. I've still been scrutinizing and reevaluating and rewriting what I wrote after Conference. I haven't convinced myself that it isn't too much.
I did want to say something about my nephews. When I was at the park with one of them, we were riding bikes around the tennis court. He said that the leaves on the court were geysers. Instantly I extrapolated and clarified that the geysers were indeed miniature volcanic eruptions of which we couldn't let our bike wheels touch. I noted, with a keen understanding of these imminently nervous circumstances that there was only one entrance into this court. There were more leaves surrounding it than anywhere else. It appeared that we were trapped.
As I began the journey toward freedom I carefully maneuvered my wheels through the ever thickening lava geysers. I came to a halt feeling as though I couldn't go on. I looked back and there was my nephew fearlessly following me! But he didn't stop where I did, in fact he passed me without hesitation. Being conscious of the young mind's ability to alter rules that have previously been established to benefit a personal agenda I carefully watched his front wheel and was fully prepared to call him out on driving into a lava geyser. He didn't run into one. He zigged and he zagged, almost fell over, and quite precariously made his way, nearly impossibly so, through a dense maze of lava geysers all the way through the narrow metal gate to safety. Determined, I made it through as well, but not without reversing several times and stopping and carefully plotting my course.
It was quite astonishing actually. It called me back to more youthful times when I was the author of epic tales, utilizing hundreds of action figures, carefully crafting my scenarios that perpetually played out in my head. They physically took place over the shelves of the library in my house all the way out to my fields of dirt that had been previously constructed with plywood and shovels into cities and intricate landscapes.
I thought about the imagination, and yes, we as adults, recognize that they, the children, have active imaginations, but we forget how powerful they are. I only emphasize this because I caught a glimpse of it. No, I didn't just see it in them. I felt it.
We used to create rules to games, imagine worlds, conjure up invisible friends and even sometimes whole complex societies with multiple facets that all coalesced into one incredible story, game or universe, and it all, though inspired by the material world, derived in unique form from our heads. And then we grew up. Then the unforgiving realities of life and love began to seize upon the two most vital components of the living soul, the mind and heart.
The imagination almost imperceptibly is muzzled. Slowly it's led into prison by nothing other than the demands of life. Staying alive in a world governed by both immutable laws and corruptible causes even the most heroic and ingenious children to abandon all that was previously known. All the while the soul in-betwixt these two realm is ferociously fought over and capitalized on by those willing to incorporate God, and then turned to fiction by those intelligent enough to see those charlatans for who they are. In the mean time, God remains still, in the heart of the penitent. The ceaselessly faithful, true to love, yet ignorant in the eyes of their detractors, await with broken hearts and convicted minds in their fullers fields and in their Gethsemanes for their own worlds to create, for their once cherished imaginations to return in glory and solidly into reality as they begin to learn of the pliability of the eternal universe.
How ironic though. We are stripped of our childhood ways by the cold and unforgiving laws, but when our own imaginations, our own rules to our own games become real, when they solidify, at their very inceptions we create new binding laws which in turn strip some other poor creature of its own inherent unbound wonders. What then are we to do?
What then, I wouldn't say. But now and here I'd extrapolate upon Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
To be continued