Infinite

We lovingly refer to our old houseboat on Lake Lanier as our ‘escape pod’.  We’ve been slipping off to this change of venue most weekends, in all seasons, for over three years now. I doubt I’ll ever find the perfect string of words to describe how my soul finds respite here.

Even when I think I’ve finally run out of inspiration, when I’m at the end of my words, all I have to do is sit on the back deck with a cup of coffee, mesmerized by the ever moving waters, listening to the wild sounds cranked out by the Canadian geese, ducks, hawks, crows, and the seagulls that come to vacation here in winter, and somehow I am renewed enough to write again. 

I do quite a lot of musing and thinking and pondering here. My imaginings do not always end up in print. Some things I ache to say but just can’t for all sorts of reasons. Prudence is the better part of valor - as they say.

But today, New Year’s Day 2019, sipping my steaming second cuppa, tuned in to the cacophony of geese and gull chatter coming from the thick wall of morning January fog, I found some words I think I ought to share. 

Our boat is moored in a perfect slip, in our opinion. From our vantage point on the back deck we have witnessed with shock and awe and I have photographed and videoed mind blowing sunrises. At Winter Solstice the sun is on the right and emerges from behind a stand of trees on the far bank. The changing of the seasons, the time of sunrise, and the sun’s location is completely predictable and dependable and I have learned to pay attention to the daily subtle tracking back to the left in daily increments of minutes until Summer Solstice, where the sun then rises in our unobstructed straight ahead view, throwing off orange streaks on the water as it makes its way upward following an ancient path. 

This just never gets old. 

What occurred to me this morning, as I watched the fog swell and then slowly dissipate, was the predictability of it all and yet how each and every day the sunrise, regardless the weather or season, technicolor or grayscale, is never the same. Ever. Wrap your brain around this - regardless how many sunrises there have been from any vantage point since the earth was formed, there has never been two alike. 

The conundrum of this realization, that we live in a world full of both the predictable, the trackable, the measurable and the definable that flows openly, like moving waters, along side the immeasurable, the unseen, the unknown, represents infinite variety.

My fully stimulated brain recalled a quote I read recently that exemplified for me the most arrogant of human intellectual myopia - paraphrased, the idea was that ‘if there is a god, it’s highly unlikely this deity would require mankind to bow and worship him.’  I thought when I read that how unimaginative human intelligence is. How blind to the reality of infinite variety. What mankind cannot define and/or understand is summarily stuffed in a box and labeled ‘impossible’.

Come sit on this back deck with me, watch the ever so predictable sun splash gold and neon orange water colors on the never before assembled random clouds, as it slowly rises into a brand new unused day. Then tell me that the ways humans require and demand all things to fit within specific and minimal options, makes any sense whatsoever. 

We are like busy little ants climbing and exploring a fence post. We think what we can see, touch, then determine an explanation for, is all there is or that we need to know. 

FYI, there is a fisherman in the photo above. You can’t see him because his silhouette blends into the stand of trees next to the dock. I know he is there but you will just have to take my word for it. The photograph is made up of thousands of pixels but just because the human eye can’t discern all the variables of gray between black and white, doesn’t mean he isn’t there. 

This new day, this new year, what I want to share with you is the glory of the infinite, the art of the possible, the power of that which you can see and that which you cannot. 

For Him,

Meema