Cold steel lounge chair
What has got my intellectual juices up enough to post? It takes something; that is, I don’t write everyday like I used to, although I should, it makes one introspective.
So, being up later than the normal, instead of hitting the hay, I decide to venture out onto my deck and into my ‘cold steel lounge chair’. Point in fact - its not steel, it’s not cold, and it might not be a lounge chair, it’s some kind of extra plush, old, outdoor chair, with an aluminum frame. My eighty plus year old grandmother (she doesn’t like you mentioning her exact age) bought it for me at a random rummage sale.
So I made a choice. I could live indoors, as usual, or I could venture into the wilderness of my back deck and take a few minutes to see the stars. It’s amazing how many times I choose the former - busy, busy, you know.
There is something about looking at the stars, there is a peace. I make a point to do it everywhere I travel, and especially when I go camping, but I overlook it in my everyday activates.
So here I am. On my back porch in suburban middle America. (I only think that way in retrospect.) But, in the moment, “look at the stars, isn’t this amazing. I’m transported to being a little kid in Boy Scouts or in Nepal where there were no lights or on an island in the Bay of Honduras on a rooftop; how beautiful it is, how overwhelming, how powerful. It didn’t used to be that way. They used to be just stars, you know, things people wanted you to be interested in, but you could give or take. Now they actually hold my imagination and have some meaning.
After the awe of it all and the memories, a voice echoes into my head, some old wise sage from a move I’ve seen and since forgotten, in a deep omnipresent voice, “pinholes in the curtain of night”, a quote from Frost of Shakespeare or someone famous. It gives me chills just to think of it, in that booming, mystic, resonance. I get that a lot, some reference with all the majesty of something I’ve read or studies or heard before, but not the exact reference point. I would bet it was Shakespeare, but even so I loose half those bets.
I’ve spent so much time in the woods as a child looking up at the stars. Huddled around a campfire with my buddies or trying to convince some lass that I know the constellations, to no avail, well, occasionally. It gives me pause. I truly feel like I’m connected to the world, one with all things.
The phone rings, I’m drawn back. I’m at home, on my porch, in my cold steel lounge chair.
Wade
So, being up later than the normal, instead of hitting the hay, I decide to venture out onto my deck and into my ‘cold steel lounge chair’. Point in fact - its not steel, it’s not cold, and it might not be a lounge chair, it’s some kind of extra plush, old, outdoor chair, with an aluminum frame. My eighty plus year old grandmother (she doesn’t like you mentioning her exact age) bought it for me at a random rummage sale.
So I made a choice. I could live indoors, as usual, or I could venture into the wilderness of my back deck and take a few minutes to see the stars. It’s amazing how many times I choose the former - busy, busy, you know.
There is something about looking at the stars, there is a peace. I make a point to do it everywhere I travel, and especially when I go camping, but I overlook it in my everyday activates.
So here I am. On my back porch in suburban middle America. (I only think that way in retrospect.) But, in the moment, “look at the stars, isn’t this amazing. I’m transported to being a little kid in Boy Scouts or in Nepal where there were no lights or on an island in the Bay of Honduras on a rooftop; how beautiful it is, how overwhelming, how powerful. It didn’t used to be that way. They used to be just stars, you know, things people wanted you to be interested in, but you could give or take. Now they actually hold my imagination and have some meaning.
After the awe of it all and the memories, a voice echoes into my head, some old wise sage from a move I’ve seen and since forgotten, in a deep omnipresent voice, “pinholes in the curtain of night”, a quote from Frost of Shakespeare or someone famous. It gives me chills just to think of it, in that booming, mystic, resonance. I get that a lot, some reference with all the majesty of something I’ve read or studies or heard before, but not the exact reference point. I would bet it was Shakespeare, but even so I loose half those bets.
I’ve spent so much time in the woods as a child looking up at the stars. Huddled around a campfire with my buddies or trying to convince some lass that I know the constellations, to no avail, well, occasionally. It gives me pause. I truly feel like I’m connected to the world, one with all things.
The phone rings, I’m drawn back. I’m at home, on my porch, in my cold steel lounge chair.
Wade
