[Oe List ...] Earthrise @ 79

[Terry Bergdall]

Much thanks, John. I always appreciate your reflections. Terry

On Wed, Jul 4, 2018 at 4:47 PM, John Epps via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
wrote:

> *Earthrise @ 79*
>
> Recently we were returning from a trip to Kansas and stopped for lunch at
> Denny’s in Limon, Colorado. We’d been watching storm clouds gathering on
> the horizon and were hoping to make it home before they hit. As we were
> leaving, I held the door for an obviously elderly couple – both were
> white-haired, somewhat bent-over, and he had a cane. Walking was a chore
> and pushing open the door would have taxed their capacities. They could
> obviously use some help, so I pushed open the door and held it as they
> struggled through. Then they uttered the words that still jar me: “Thank
> you, sir.” “Sir?” Coming from them? I was taught to use that term to refer
> to those older than I. That statement occasioned an interior rainstorm of
> reflections, including lots of wind, rain, and some hail.
>
> Looking back over the last month, I’ve had more “sirs” thrown at me than
> at my senior year at The Citadel. There it was earned, deserved, and
> welcomed. Here it’s a surprising address heralding the onset of elder-ness
> that I didn’t think I had earned (yet) or deserved, and certainly not
> welcomed. There are plenty of signs, from the number of medications it
> takes to keep going to the diminishing energy and frequent naps. But I have
> ignored those as simply the afflictions of a young man with something gone
> wrong (to use a phrase from JWM).
>
> Reality will not be denied. It breaks through our facades.
>
> This time it drove me to look at a work I’d heard about but never
> examined: “On Holy Living and Dying” by Jeremy Taylor published in 1839 (a
> century before my birth). I turned quickly to the section on Holy Dying.
> Here’s an excerpt. “A person is a bubble…all the world is a storm, and
> people rise up in their several generations…like bubbles descending from
> nature and Providence; and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of
> their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other
> business in the world but to be born, that they may be able to die: others
> float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give
> their place to others: and those that live longest in the face of the
> waters, are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy; and being crushed
> with the great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change
> not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than
> it was before. So is everyone….”
>
> This goes on for 10 pages with powerful images and the same message about
> our relative insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things. Somehow, and I
> don’t know how, I found this strangely comforting, and not unsettling as
> one might assume. You just never know where wonder will break through, but
> when it does, it’s well worth celebrating.
>
> John Epps
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OE mailing list
> OE at lists.wedgeblade.net
> http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe-wedgeblade.net/attachments/20180704/aad5d322/attachment.html>