I am not the Creator of heaven and earth

I made a little pond some years ago. There are plants and tadpoles and goldfish and lots of other things in it. There’s water.

I am not the Creator of heaven and earth, but I think like one some times.

And I have made people in my own image. That is I have formed them from out of flesh and blood into the beings that live and breathe somehow within my being. I don’t have the omniscience to know when one falls as sparrows do from time to time, but so many people have become somebody for me. They are not as the drops of rain or the grains of sand. They have names and faces. I know them. They are like my children or my parents or my brothers and sisters. Well, I have idealized these words, in a way. I was not actually very close to my mother, for example, but yet we must have been very close in ways that I don’t remember very well. She made me.

But I think that there is now a world of people partly of my imagining who I feel close to as if we were family.

So many I could tell you about, yet they are also other, each their own person, not made by me, real in ways I do not know.

But here is my part. I have imagined them to be part of me. In some real ways I have created who they are in my mind.

This is a mystery for me and yet I know it as the bedrock truth of my existence.

I step outside in the middle of the night and look up at the stars – some brighter than others. So distant yet this one or that one enters into my mind – if only its glittering light.

My world is not about fairness. I play favorites with people. Some have become more important to me than others. Some people make my heart ache in a way that I crave.

If there were a Creator as the biblical story speaks of, I imagine that God would think of the beings that she had created and then had given the freedom to be themselves. She would think of them often.

My own power is more circumscribed. My world is peopled with beings who I have truly imagined into a form that exists only in my mind but who are much themselves – like that star at one point of the constellation Cassiopeia.

My heart and my mind break. My universe shatters into fragments. I cannot contain it all within my brain. Omniscience, omnipotence, exceeds my grasp.

And so I let my feet trod the earth. I see and touch people. I listen to our conversations. And let me tell you from out of my thoughts, one by one, of the people who I know so very incompletely. And yet they seem so very real in my mind. They exist – they live there – in a way that only I can know. We share hints with each other, you and I, to be sure. But your world and your people must seem different in your mind, perhaps.

That is part of what I have been trying to say.

You should not be surprised if I tell you that I truly know so little of what I speak. And yet my life is somehow filled beyond bursting with you and you and you.

But here it is: I know - as much as I can know anything - of the countless longings in my heart.

I am the creator of one world. Almost all of everything else – worlds without apparent end - was not made by me.

Old school door dance

If you say ‘old school’ as in I won’t let a woman hold the door for me, then I’m not. But if you mean that I believe in things like distinctions and etiquette and protocol and the like, then you have me pegged.

Culture is largely based on lots of little rules – some of which have been created and refined over a very long period of time. I’m very much in favor of cultural change. I even like a little willy-nilly now and then. But I generally prefer the kind of actual thinking that is both conscious and then becomes subconscious about human values to an over-abundance of anything goes.

Plenty of cultural habits are out of date – but it is neither culture nor habits which are the baby we want to throw out.

Take the opening the door thing. Life is both easier and more interesting if there’s a little rule that says that the person who gets to the door handle first, opens the door for the person they’re with. Call it a common courtesy. Maybe it’s just a little game we play together. Perhaps the almost insignificant gesture might build a sense that we’re in this life together. As the favor is repeated and exchanged, not only civility, but good will is enhanced. Who knows?

Of course, I am a little old school about the other distinction here. You’ll find that I manage to shuffle my feet and move my body to get to the door just ahead of most women I’m walking with. I like dancing with women. But if you want to lead, I’ll dance with you. But if we don’t always want to dance only to the music in our own head, I think that culture – thoughtful, sensitive, respectful culture – is the old school way to go.

And if my hand touches yours on the handle, look me in the eye and smile. I’ll do the same. It’s a dance, after all, not a rule. Maybe we could change our culture with a bit more panache.

Coincidences

Of course I believe in coincidences – they happen. I also believe that I mostly make up my own meanings.

The story – and it’s not dramatic and not really that interesting, except maybe to me – begins with me mowing the lawn yesterday morning. I saw a bit of aluminum at the edge of the grass and realized that it must be a piece from one of my windmobiles. I looked up and, sure enough, the mobile, with its rusty wires and aluminum vanes, was hanging out of balance from the top of its pole, in the flowers, this vane and a slender length of rusty wire had broken off and fallen.

Only a few yesterdays more ago, I had explained to someone about making these mobiles some many years ago and how, in the weather - with the rain and the constant moving at the joints from the wind - the wires on this mobile drifting in the breeze would wear through just like on the other mobile near the pond with elements hanging awkwardly.

And now that someone and her family are thousands of miles away in Russia, a piece of glinting aluminum at the edge of the grass merely a reminder of things that happen.

It means something to me that we met, these people becoming friends. It might not have happened that way, but it did. I will need to fix this windmobile – and the one by the pond – before they get back. Connecting to people is more than coincidence – if not much more, sometimes.

And now sometimes a dandelion will remind me of her two girls. But that’s another story I’ll tell myself sometimes. There’s a photo of them that crossed the ocean on a slender wire in which they sit in a field full of tall dandelion heads. Just a breath and the fluff will fly. Like vanes on a rusty mobile.

Of course I believe in coincidences.