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?

When you were a child, did you ever lose a ball over the fence, a Frisbee onto the roof or a kite into a tree? It’s hard not to panic when something you care about suddenly slips out of sight. Sometimes we managed to get those beloved playthings back, and sometimes we didn’t. But not too infrequently, when you went looking for the item that escaped, you would find something else entirely, something you thought was gone forever, or that you had completely forgotten about.

What have you found when you were looking for something else?

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?