Been thinkin’ about…rivers and light

The shadows of leaves dance on my living room wall, end of another day, end of another hot summer day. Science tells us, obviously, the earth's rotation changes our perspective on the sun, just another star in just another galaxy of stars. Just the same, my sun sets, marking time, marking space, and the end of another long day.

StateoftheOzarks Farmers Market went well this Saturday and I, fueled by Vintage Paris espresso and Back Porch iced tea and probably not quite enough cool well water, made it through, mostly. I sometimes think we leave bits and pieces of our souls where we go, especially where there is a lot of intensity. I think about that idea when I stand on old theater stages and listen for the whispers in the dark. And, for better or worse, we truly bleed out bits of our souls in the name of craft.

We can walk through the Farmers Market and just see tents and tables and merchandise, but our Market folks are special, as are all earnest and intent artisans. In a world of manufacture, we crave something personal, something handcrafted, something somehow made more real through care and attention. I watch my vendors, my artisans, my people. I know something of how they care. It is in spaces like Farmers Market that we somehow touch more real.

The shadows of leaves are lower now. The sun seems to move faster near the western horizon. The light shines on my old family photos, moments captured, magic-like, in time. The view from high up on Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga. Was I nine or was I 10 that year we walked across the swinging bridge and even saw the dark-light fairytale villages which inspired Neil Gaiman in his novel “American Gods?” Next photo over is the view of the McCluggage Bridge on the Illinois River, taken from the Spirit of Peoria riverboat, taken at hot summer sunset from beneath the bridge.

Rivers have somehow framed much of my life. Great big American rivers, the smell of water lilies, the smell of mud. The sun would set over the Mississippi at Fort Madison, Iowa, over the big, hinged, double-decker railroad bridge, a monolithic thing, an overlooked icon to a strange, almost-steam-punk past. In the warm and quiet water next to the Illinois side of the bridge, American lotus would bloom in profusion. We would roll down the windows of my mom's S-10 Chevy, smelling the sweet. It was a moment I hoped would last forever. Each time we crossed the river, I would try to time the cassette tape to play Charley Pride's lilting, simple verses, “Roll On Mississippi.”

"There she goes / Disappearing around the bend / Roll on, Mississippi / You make me feel like a child again...."

I haven't listened to that song for a long time. For the longest time, I couldn't. The pain was too much. A small bit of my childhood, locked away to mourn in peace, alone and far away from my heart. I had too much to do, too much life to overlook, in the chaos of business. But the heart can only sustain so long beneath the weight of responsibility and never-ending business. The big rivers continue, and there on the banks is solace. The bridges are still the same as is the feel of the summer air above the deep waters. Time is a strange thing and too many years have passed. I cannot really be as old as I am, but I haven't finished my journey, not yet. I look down the rivers of my mind, my past. There is always another bend, another turn in the river, another adventure. The timelessness of Tom Sawyer is very real, striking a strange chord much in the way as Route 66. We long for the never-ending roads, places our souls can go even when we think we cannot make it another breath, another step, even another thought. There is hope in the horizon.

The sun is almost gone, another demarcation in time, another earth's rotation older. The microcosmic intensity of our self-importance can overwhelm us and we need the attention, the care, the hope, to find space, to find perspective. The look of love in a puppy's eyes. The thought that, even with all that has passed on, nothing of great love is ever really gone. I often wonder — If I can remember a thing, if I can share it and let others remember the thing as well, is the thing even really ever gone?

The willow tree's leaves were soft in that hot August afternoon long ago. The big, multi-trunked willow was just west of my childhood home and my mom had pulled up the tree as a young sapling and replanted the tiny thing in the yard when there were once no trees. The willow must have found some spring deep in that Illinois clay because by the time I was a child, the thing was massive and, after “Return of the Jedi,” we crafted an Ewok village among the branches where I could take my action figures out and play Battle of Endor over and over. After a long drought, the tree died. I cried.

Tonight, the moon, a waning crescent, will sail close to the Pleiades star cluster. The Pleiades are called the Seven Sisters, and have proven significant to many great ancient cultures. The Aztecs said the rise of the Pleiades marked the death of the world. Strangely, the Celts believed something similar, associating the star cluster with the thinning of the veil, a time of mourning, of acceptance of death and hope in rebirth. The ancients have much to teach us, the ancients we insult with the name "primitive" at our own peril. Life and death, light and love, river and sky, the strange rhythms of this thing called Life are at once overwhelming beneath the summer heat, and weirdly invigorating. We never truly know what's around the next bend, even and ever as the waning and hot sun is still on the river.