I have taken to acknowledging the shortest day and the longest day of the year in recent trips around the sun. I do appreciate the bittersweet notion that as we embark on the coldest days of the year, the days slowly but surely begin to grow longer as if to promise that spring will be here before long.
In a different way, I appreciate the bittersweet notion that as we embark on the warmest days of the year, the days slowly but surely begin to grow shorter as if to remind us that autumn is on its way.
There’s a poetry and a symmetry to the four seasons. It’s really all one needs to accept the existence of God. This universe has a design, suggesting a higher power, a designer, a Creator.
You are welcome to believe it’s all random. As for me, I believe the heavens declare the glory of God.
As long as I’m dipping into the archives for a day, why not some shameless self-promotion? Here are the titular entries from the two books I published this year, See the World! and The Man Who Crossed WhimsyAvenue.
It might be too late to get them in time for Christmas, or maybe not —ask your favorite bookseller.
(Yes, you may recall I set a crazy goal to publish 12 books in 2025. What can I say? It was a crazy goal.)
See the world!
I have a new resolution: See the world.
It’s not what you think. I’m not planning to reallocate my resources so I can go explore ruins or exotic islands and rain forests and teeming cities.
No: I aim to see the world.
I resolve to look around me and see not just the sleeping dogs and dust bunnies but the way the sun brightens and nourishes everything it touches — and the rain, too, in its turn. I plan to be aware of how the air fills my lungs differently when I consciously take in a breath as opposed to leaving the automatic pilot in control.
I plan to notice the echinacea and the compass plants that have bloomed in recent days, and I intend to watch the bees and the beetles visit the new flowers to do their thing. I plan to watch the pelicans fly high overhead and contemplate what they see from their vantage point.
When I resolve to see the world, I expect to see things that sadden as much as delight me, but I expect most of all to see things that fascinate me, for the world is nothing if not fascinating. See how much there is to see! Perhaps that’s why our eyes glaze over and we forget to look: There is just so much, and when we try to see it all, our senses overload. But how much we miss when we pass over and shut it down!
I’m not talking about the sensory overload from doom-scrolling and media shouting and artificial intelligence and algorithms — no, I’m talking about what I see when I lift my eyes from the screen to the hills, to the sky, and to the wonders right next to me, just beyond my reach, whether it’s a rabbit frozen in my back yard hoping I don’t see or it’s a weed growing between the cracks in an ancient sidewalk.
See the world! I’m not talking about taking a journey through soul-sapping airports for hours and days to see what there is to see far, far away, although you’re certainly welcome to do so. I’m talking about seeing the world where you’re planted, being aware of the wonder and the beauty and, yes, the appalling and the ugly, the right here and the right now.
We grow accustomed to our surroundings, to our world, to our quotidian, so much so that we stop seeing it, and in doing so we rob ourselves of life itself. We are meant to see the world — every part of it, every second — and to drink it in, and savor it, and change what we can and accept what we can’t, but to see it all.
Look! Taste and see! Isn’t it fascinating?
The Man Who Crossed Whimsy Avenue
A man was walking along, deep in thought, lost in worries about this and that and another thing, when suddenly he realized he had stumbled into a wonderland.
Everything was bright colors and magic buses and this can’t be real, but it was real enough and whimsically nonsensical.
“You there!” cried a friendly enough looking police officer. “Why are you dressed so drably? Why aren’t you smiling? Are you quite all right?”
“I’m not sure,” said the man. “Where is this?”
“Ah, it’s another one,” the officer said gently. “You were walking along all worried, right?”
“I don’t see how that’s anyone’s —“
“Right, right, right,” smiled the officer. “That’s absolutely correct, it’s not my business. Well enough. You just didn’t notice you’d crossed Whimsy Avenue. No worries, you’re going to be fine, move along.”
And the officer walked away. Now the man looked around and saw that, no matter where he looked, he saw something impossibly amazing.
“Here now, watch where you’re going,” said a cat with a cockney accent in a tuxedo.
“Woof,” said a friendly dog who sniffed at his hand and looked around for balls.
Above, the sky was orange — not the majestic orange of a setting sun, but the orange of an orange (you know, the fruit) or construction paper.
“I can show you the way to Normal,” huffed a gray-haired woman in glasses, “but you won’t like it there, not ever again.”
And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It seemed the woman had been a tense old thing until one day she happened upon Whimsy Avenue — although she found some people called it Whimsy Street, for some reason — and she never looked back, although she did still tend to fuss about.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just an old fuss bucket. No harm intended,” she would tell people.
There may be some tales to tell about the man and the fussy gray-haired woman on Whimsy Avenue, if I can find my way back there myself …
