Outside The Box

Another Halloween has come and gone without a single trick-or-treater. Another big bowl of peanuts and prunes to wrap up and put away until next year. We don’t know why the kids stopped coming.

I’m tempted to have a Heath Bar with my coffee this morning, but I’ll stick with toast. We wouldn’t waste our little supply of Heath Bars on kids, even if they did come. The sugar is bad for them.

Maybe next year we’ll add some horehound candy to the mix. That was my dad’s favorite, and during Christmas, I would sometimes bring him a bag from Betty’s Country Store, which was about the only place I could find it. European settlers brought the horehound plant to America during the 19th century, but its use dates back at least as far as ancient Egypt, where it was known as the “Seed of Horus” and valued for its healing properties. It has a unique flavor somewhere between licorice and mint, and a bag of the strange brownish candy would last a long, long time at our house when we were kids.

It is a beautiful Friday morning on this 1st day of November as the glow of the maples outside my window keeps distracting me from this communiqué. Every morning is beautiful when you pause long enough to appreciate it, but this morning is particularly enchanting because it rained again last night, and we don’t have to worry about fire for a few more days in the thickening layers of leaves collecting on the forest floor—leaves that were getting far too crunchy for those of us with an intimate recollection of the fires in 2016.

The deer were in the backyard again before dawn, down where the acorns collect in the drainage ditch below the laurel thicket. They know they’re safe here during hunting season. Safer than any poachers would be. They know the sound of our voices and the schedules of our pups. We have an agreement with them that we will only shoot at targets unless someone gets hungry enough to do otherwise, and even then, we don’t shoot anything with a name. If you like venison, it’s best that you don’t name your deer.

The robins are with us again, filling the trees below the barn by the hundreds in the morning and especially in the evening when they drop down to see what the chickens may have left behind. There are more species of birds hitting the feeders now than I can identify, and we’re all glad that the bear has so much mast to eat this fall that she’s not interested in adding bird feed to her diet on these not-very-Novembery days.

The rhythms of life continue as they have done for millennia, oblivious to the sound and fury of idiots’ tales and all the vanity and vexation of spirit which rises to a crescendo every four years. Beauty and wonder are abundant and easy to find when you look for them, and if you’re reading this on the day after the election, you might want to keep that in mind.

A trick for some, a treat for others: About 80 million people are going to be satisfied with the results. Another 80 million are going to be disappointed, or worse. Same as last election. An uncomfortably large percentage of both groups will desperately need to learn to forgive the other side for having an opinion. Tragically, many will not. Again, same.

If all your information comes to you via glowing pixels, and if those pixels are sponsored by the half dozen corporations that peddle information and entertainment, and if you consume only one brand of information and never sample any of the others, and if you never look out the window or separate your awareness from the pervasive technological hive mind which feeds on the drama it creates, then you might believe that what just occurred is the most important thing in the world.

Yet here in this single nation on a small planet circling the fringe of a modest galaxy floating in the vastness of space, less than half of us voted. Some were too young, and therefore occupied with something far more important than politics, which is childhood. Some were too busy, or convinced that it would not matter.

It matters, but the drama has claimed far too much territory in our waking minds and far too many hours of the precious and few days we are granted. Its hooks sink deeply into the flesh of our emotional muscles, and these hooks are barbed, making their removal at least as painful as being pulled along at their urging.

If you’re feeling victorious this morning, understand that it was a Pyrrhic victory. If you feel defeated, remember that, even with all its faults, this is still and by far the most robust democracy on our little planet, and the political pendulum will continue to swing in spite of the determined efforts to pull it off its suspension spring. So for God’s sake, close the laptop, turn off the television, and take a walk. Leave the phone on the table.