Binging the magic

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The stream giveth, and the stream taketh away. I recently discovered the TV show Nashville, which had its first run from 2012 to 2018, just in time to also discover that it was leaving Netflix after Monday, Sept. 14.

I finished Season 4 on Sunday night, and I had run out of time to binge Seasons 5 and 6 in their entirety, so I looked at the IMDb ratings and found the top-rated episodes from the final two seasons. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that most of my Monday was devoted to catching eight or nine 42-minute stories including, of course, the series finale.

I am clearly a sucker for stories about writing songs and trying to make a life making music. They built a pile of endearing and not-so-endearing characters and tossed them in a room together. Even though I’ve now seen the best of those last two seasons, I expect I’ll revisit those seasons and all of Nashville when the stream decides to give it back, someday.

Watching all that songwriting magic gave me the itch to pick up my own guitars and see what comes out. But first I need to turn off the television and get some sleep.

Worldly wonderings

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“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

I heard myself say it and suddenly wondered what the old cliche really means. Why would the world try to stop me from attending an event if I really wanted to be there? Did the world have alternative attractions that might compete for my attention?  Under what circumstances would I be forced to say, “I’m sorry, I missed it for the world”?

I was tempted to do a web search for the origins of the phrase, but I had already lost 10-15 minutes that morning to random searches and scrolling on my phone. I wondered if the phone was a metaphor for the world — “I wouldn’t miss it for all the doomscrolling I can imagine.”

Christians cast the world in a shadow light — there is the pure and good and honest choice, and then there is the worldly one. We sometimes say, “We are not of this world,” or “We are in the world, but not of it,” and I wondered if there was a connection between those phrases and “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

I know: It’s just another way of saying “I don’t want to miss this,” but now I’ll always wonder why the world would want me not to go.

Light and Dark must balance, but not Good and Evil

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Hard to believe the autumn equinox is coming up in a week or so, and the darker months will be upon us.

I’m trying to imagine a story or mythology about the eternal struggle between Light and Dark — half of the time Light gains the upper hand, but Dark rallies and the days grow slowly colder. And like a stopped annual clock, twice a year their game ends in a tie.

One year Dark cheats and wins more than his share, and spring is delayed. The resulting imbalance shows Dark that he cheats himself by cheating his opponent, who is his brother.

I don’t fully accept the metaphor that Light and Dark must balance. Good does not need an equal supply of Evil for a balanced world, so the analogy does not fit exactly. But I can see the balance in nature — life and death, light and dark, summer and winter. In that sense, to everything there is a season.

I don’t agree that there is a time for hate, or a time for war, but I accept that in most cases there must be a balance. Fear not, for the dawn is coming, inevitably.