Lost poetry

I’m in a place now where all I can do is sit and try to decide what is important. I can’t let myself get trapped into a cycle of self-maintenance like I see so many do. What is meaningful? To what is it worth devoting the limited amount of time I have in this one life I have? Some things that are not meaningful are becoming abundantly clear. Now that I’m on a sabbatical of sorts from campus ministry, the house I used to barely see is now nicer than ever, and will probably improve all the more through the summer, especially with preparing to have a wife live in it. But there’s a tiny part of me that wouldn’t have minded seeing it all blow away in a tornado tonight. It’s all mammon, really. My wonderful future wife today suggested a trip in which we live out of her car for a while and depend on God and others. I think it’s a great idea. Will we do it? We’ll see. I hope she consistently tests my innate desire for security.

_________

I took Jinny to a wonderfully eccentric local restaurant called The Mont in Norman two weekends ago. All Normanites know it well. It’s a place where I always relive a peaceful nostalgia when I’m there. Inside, built into the old hardwood-paneled walls, are shelves loaded with all kinds of dusty old books. In college, every now and again my friends and I would pack into one of the tables next to a bookshelf, start pulling them off the wall one by one, write random lines of poetry on random pages, and then stick them back into a random spot in the sea of books. I’m sure those witty lines of silliness are still shoved away on those walls. Will they ever be discovered? Can the authors even uncover their lost pieces of word art if they tried? Unlikely. But that doesn’t change the lasting brilliance or significance of moments of genius like “Ode to Sloop.”

That’s where we create meaning. I don’t want to ever lose that.

Advertisement