Need to chill out a while? I know I did. And so….well, here I am at the beach at Indian Pass, FL for the month of November, and today is chilly for sure. Winter is coming.
The first two weeks here have been warm and gorgeous, from sunrises to sunsets. Some of our children and grandchildren (the three little girls) visited on the first weekend. We had loads of fun; fires on the beach and s’mores.
The next week my husband and I began to notice things going wrong with the house ( a beautiful house really–but not a young one) This has kept up until it’s become somewhat funny. Have we told the rental company? Oh yes. Has anything been done? Oh no.
Not a thing–for two weeks. In fact, I’m getting used to the chirp of the smoke alarm. We can’t change the battery ourselves because some of the ceilings are fifteen feet. But if it stopped now, I think I might miss it because it reminds me of a parakeet one of my sons brought home during a college break, and left in his room at home, for years, for me to take care of. Of course, when you have to take care of something you usually grow to love it.
One of the reasons we came here is for me to work on a another book, and that brings out in me a lot of life-musing about living in today’s world. Living is full of simple aggravations and complaints. Oddly these are the smaller things that bug us–sometimes bug us more than much more serious situations we ought to be dealing with.
Time to take out the spectacles of definition. What is most important? What is least important? Are hearts involved? Which things are we actually responsible for, and which are another’s responsibility?
There is a lot of corruption, evil, and violence in our world–all the work of a less noble chamber of the human heart. But we have a very noble chamber, too, and a loveable one. We only have to allow it to work that way, to act out the love within us–love that God put there.
Love is like a fire; it begins with a spark unique to each of us.
Like the characters in a book, our personal spark toward genuine love for ourselves and others comes from our particular character traits, our likes and dislikes, and a whole lot about what we are willing to do to get where we want to be.
What is the spark that will ignite the love in you and me? What will cause us to take the high road toward love, or the low one toward indifference or even evil?
Translating a World on the Edge 