Last color

 November 24, 2008 – About the only time I truly think I’m crazy living up here is nights like tonight when rain turns to freezing ice, and I am driving down a country lane in the truck and suddenly I have lost control and the truck is spinning back and forth and sideways. I’ve been up in the country for nearly 10 years, and I know now that there is little you can do, once you are upon a sheet of black ice you didn’t see coming. The ABS brakes sort of take over and you try and simply flow with it, skating for 100 yards or so, and this has happened more times than I care to count, and it reminds me of the power of winter, and the curious experience of driving out in the dark late at night on a road with no houses for miles.
 Perhaps it helps to be nuts. The truck did a great job of staying on the road, and I am grateful for the snow tires I put on last week.
 Now I am alert to driving at night in the wet and cold.
  This is a part of life in the country, and this time of year, you think about going out at night, but driving is also a part of life. I trust my truck now, and it won’t fail me. The trick is to be alert and cautious, but not give in to fear. Isn’t that the trick the rest of the time, too? I was joking that I worry all the time about the silliest and most meaningless things, but skidding on ice doesn’t frighten me at all. Odd.

Winston in the barn. He does it well

 November 24, 2008 – Looking forward to a quiet few days of blogging, reading, thinking, time with dogs, writing, photo taking. Six years ago, I left my life in New Jersey behind and came to the country. It has been an amazing experience, beautiful, awful, challenging, uplifting, difficult, and full of joy and growth and pain. Life itself.
  I go in and out of periods with thinkers I love – Churchill, Lincoln, Hannah Arendt, E.B. White, and Thomas Merton, perhaps most of all. I am deep in a Merton period.

  “The thing to do when you have made a mistake is not to give up doing what you were doing and start doing something altogether new, but to start over again with the thing you began badly and try, for the love of God, to do it well.”

  – The Sign of Jonas
 
  One of the things I love about Merton was his struggle with faith and certainty. Some think they knew what everyone else should always do, but Merton was never sure what he or anybody else ought to do, and this, to me, is true humility and the foundation of faith. I make so many mistakes I can’t keep track of them, but I believe, or try to believe that the answer to mistakes – as it often is with fear – is to simply start over again, and try and do it well, and honestly. I wish I could say that I always do that, but like Merton, the point is to try, not necessarily to always succeed. In this sense, I am a sinner, for sure. Others too, I’m certain.