Been thinking about…Blue cedar sky

The sky was special that afternoon in the late summer, a hazy blue that just led the way forever to far away southwest lands while close cotton clouds gathered over the lake. The winding road seemed to just go on too, even as it wound its close way around ridges and cedar glades. Ridgeline Ozark blacktops have a strange, sad melody all their own, perhaps more so even as the summer begins to die. Summer is yet all around us — and the truck thermometer reads nearly 100 degrees — but somehow, something has changed. The season’s end is beginning to whisper in the leaves and pine boughs, even as the sun heats the evergreens to something like boiling and the dark forest smells spicy.

We go to work, and then we go to work again, finding cool and air conditioned respite in office spaces and bright grocery stores. We complain about the heat, about the weather. “How are you doing,” we ask each other. “Busy,” we reply. Always busy. Never enough time. Not with work, not with the kids, not with school, and a million things happening. There’s too much noise in the world to listen, not to really, truly listen. Not to stop, not to breathe. Another meeting, and another. We move too fast, drive too fast, impatience is the word of the day. Failure is not an option. And so we hustle at all cost. Beyond our point of care, the crows have begun to croak from the tree tops and a gray tom cat prowls the roadside forest, eyes green in the afternoon.

America was built on hustling and faith and faith in hustling and that has brought something like great prosperity into our lives, generation after generation. But even as we may now have freed ourselves from that thing which could be called silly superstition or great faith — patting ourselves on the back for moving into something called a “post-Christian” era — we’ve found a difficult truth: human beings are gonna worship something no matter the cost. That worship could be a commercial brand, a store, a town, a nation, a political party, a celebrity, a mainstream media, an alt-media. Worship and magic are built into the human experience. Rather than ignore the thing, it is much better to open our eyes to the thing.

And recently I’ve not been able to shake the sense of a something, somewhere, that is off-kilter, something that is wrong, something that feels off, like a door left ajar somehow in the back of our collective mind, a door leading into a far-off place that we would rather not go. The stars continue to wheel in the sky, the moon continues to grow in the night, the sun a new fiery chariot crossing the Ozarks day after long, hot summer day. And the splinter in the mind continues to grow — a sense of something not quite right, celestial foreboding in the August heat and summer shadow.

And then, on the cusp of the moon’s fullness and the coming eclipse, a week of loss after impossible loss. Personal loss, community loss, national loss, layers of the previously unthinkable, wars and griefs private and personal and also grand and shared. The world stops. Even as we briefly come together, we avoid the obvious — we really don’t know how to go forward, and in time we will replace grief and meaning with just more “being busy” and hope for the best, solace in a full schedule that continuously feels empty. In the face of loss and tragedy, what does anything really mean, anyway?

The sun sets. The sun rises. The moon waxes. The moon wanes. The world just stops. And yet just keeps spinning feverishly. And in this moment, it is now my job to continue to build a certain festival — the Ninth Annual StateoftheOzarks Fest — for our Hollister and Branson community. Never a festival-by-the-numbers, never an event that I just phone in, still the festival on Saturday, September 12, in downtown Hollister, is meant to be fun, meant to be a celebration, meant to be a party. And our community is hurting. How does it all make any sense? At nightfall after a hot Wednesday, I stare at the walls, absent phone in hand, dog on my lap, and wish for better days just a week ago when the world was complicated and busy.

“The most patriotic thing we can do,” wrote a commentator this week, “is love our neighbor.” “I will honor Dolly by being kind and having huge boobs,” said a meme sent to me by a friend. We are a complex, nuanced species, created to laugh hysterically, created to sob uncontrollably. We are a people who don’t fit in boxes. We are a people who create civilization by fitting others and ourselves into boxes. And we say and do the things that often make the least amount of sense.

StateoftheOzarks Fest a party? Maybe. But maybe something more. A day the community can come together, maybe to laugh, perhaps more importantly to cry. A place where our humanity can shine in all our weirdness, our soul, our heart. A place of art and craft, of songs sung with love of this strange thing called life. And perhaps healing can begin, again, all over, as it always does, even after the world stops. And perhaps there’s beauty in this whole, wild, terrible, wonderful mess we do call life.

And somehow, I like to believe that the old blacktop on the ridge lives on forever, beneath a forever summer sun as the cedars turn spicy in the heat, and the crows croak from the tree tops and the sky fades into a hazy blue as it marches on to far away southwest lands and a gray tom cat still prowls the roadside forest, eyes forever green in the afternoon.