The Narrative Image

“These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.”  - Anton Chekhov, “A Day in the Country”     “We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived.” - Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy     “Thanks, Scott, for your comments. I am grateful. Very simply, we can encounter God without even reading the Bible. Aquinas says if you want to know something about God, t...

In the short, cold, dismal gray days of winter, I can drive to work before the sun comes up, drive home after it goes down, and never see it or feel its radiation for weeks at a time. So Friday night I strapped the canoe to the top of the truck and headed out to Smith and Bybee lakes before sunrise. At the east edge of Smith Lake, I pushed the canoe off the ice rimmed shoreline into the cold dark water and headed west. An icy whisper of wind stirred up a train of wavelets that gently splashed against the bow and retarded my progress, but the paddling kept me warm. In those moments of transition, as the sky lightened, and the trees began to murmur, I recalled the words from the creation myth that my particular culture endorses. “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”” I turned the canoe around and stopped paddling. I floated in the middle of the lake...