Four Grounds For Standing

Jesus tells a simple story of four grounds, one farmer and a sack full of seed. The farmer never changes. Neither does the seed. The soil, then, tells the story.

One ground is hard and unresponsive. Trampled on by the weight of the world, it yields no harvest. No better is the ground covered in thorns and thistles, nor the one embedded with stone. Only the good soil welcomes the seed, nurturing and feeding it until it produces much fruit.

Interesting, perhaps, is the soil never mentioned in the story. Jesus never speaks of burlap. He never speaks of dried cloth, presumably because any fool knows no seed planted in burlap will grow. The seed among thorns or stones has a preferable lot to one buried there. Even the seed carried off on the wings of crows stands a better chance. So what is a listening ear to make of the omission?

Seeds were never made to stay in the sack. Better to sow the beaten path than to ruin the seed in silence. So much power in a speck of seed that may grow into a mighty, towering tree, yet it is utterly helpless until it touches ground. Only then is it anything at all. And the simple sower, whose poured-out sweat and blood can make the plant not one inch taller nor shorter, can keep an entire field from growing by doing something so common as nothing at all.

It is a humbling lesson from the story to hope terribly he does not.

Wedding Dance

Play on, music. Play on.

Standing neatly by as one darkened piece to an encirlcling black and pink backdrop, the scene spoke. A father quivers back tears. Billowed waves of white flow down from the sides of his eldest daughter, just touching the floor. Four feet turn innocently, interrupted by each other only enough to suggest their motion is no common one. The music plays.

Suddenly the sight of this man speaks out to the one watching as if by name. A man never known, never spoken to beyond a half smile earlier that same day, becomes a lesson. Play on, music.

One man struggles to compose himself within a foreign moment, holding his child for the final time before entrusting her into the care of another man. In doing so, without knowing it, he stirs deeply the soul of an onlooker who realizes in an indelible instant that he is now far closer to that moment--kissing his beloved child goodbye for her own sake--than he will ever again be to the happily imagined one, the man who dances with the girl next.

Such a thought nearly seats a person itself. Too much for anyone to grasp all at once, it leads quickly to another.

Play on, music. Play on.

Beginning

Nothing beats the smell of an unread book. More pulp than promise, the freshness of that stale scent intoxicates. As long as books are printed, they will start off smelling like this one does right now.

Of course, though, everything that ever is anything at all changes. Soon the common stench of a story told overtakes the blinding blank. Tales of places gone and things remembered, futures hoped for and lifetimes already lived take their dutiful place. It hardly ever seems there was a time without a story.

And when this book finds its place within open hands some time hence, some time much farther off than it ever actually could be, not the slightest notice will be paid to the smell of paper. Far too much attention will be devoted elsewhere, captivated within recourse and recollection.

More still, that person holding those hands will care nothing for the thoughts of this night. Nor should it be. Because for all the mind knows to be true at the mere thought of each new page, it understands the oppresive shame in having paper remembered only for it. Pages were meant for so much more, beginning with this one.