Monday

There are such beautiful stories tucked away in even the quietest, most settled lives.

Maybe people today don’t have the kind of access to memory that folks seemed to have in previous generations. The whiz-bangery of this world crowds out the wonder, and makes it hard to have, or recognize, singular experiences for what they are.

All that bright spectacle and noise pounding away at everyone from all sides, and so much desire, so many commonplace marvels to take for granted, that I suppose it’s rarer all the time for anyone to feel like they’re ever truly and actively in the moment.

We live surrounded, and even when we’re alone we’re distracted, occupied by passive entertainment, and lonely.

Still, people do stumble into moments of grace or pure magic, and sometimes they can’t help but be momentarily startled out of their lives.

That’s the sort of thing that used to happen all the time.

I have a journal in my great-grandfather’s hand in which he recounts his rural childhood in the days before electrification. He writes of venturing out on Christmas Eve and walking down the long driveway of the family farm. He and his siblings would stand in the middle of the dirt road, surrounded by the snow-swept countryside, and they would listen to the church bells ringing out from the little towns that were scattered throughout the dark fields in every direction.