Category: Meditations

A telephone booth may well be the most recent obsolete item of our modern age. You don’t have be all that old to remember the fad of seeing how many people you could stuff in a phone booth, let alone identifying with Clark Kent’s iconic changing station or thriller movies in which the bad guy makes contact via pay phone. In an age where smart phones are the norm, there’s not much point to phone booths taking up room on the sidewalk. But it can be hard to see them go.

What nostalgic, unnecessary thing do you love?

In 1988 hundreds of thousands of acres of Yellowstone National Park were burned in massive wildfires. The devastation was immense, but the lodgepole pines that make up most of the park’s forest depend on fire to release their seeds. When the rains returned, up to a million seeds per acre began to grow.

What has been the rain that allowed new life to return for you after a time of loss?

It is possible to propagate trees so that trunks weave together in a complicated basket weave. But it’s you can to work too hard at making something fancy when something simpler—just a tree—might prove more attractive.

What in your life could use simplifying?

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
–Anne Morrow Lindbergh

What joy have you found springing from the cliffs of despair?

Unlike puppies or kittens, newborn foals are able to walk and interact with the world within minutes of their birth. The may be awkward and gangly, but they pretty much hit the ground running.

What is up and running for you today, new and awkward though it may be?