Just Be a Person
- Jul 5, 2018
- 3 min read
I spent most of last week canoeing in the Boundary Waters and there are about a million things I could say about it, but I'm going to focus on one particular thread. Louis C.K. had absolutely nothing to do with this trip excepting the partial credit I give him for reminding me to just be a person. I know that he has done some awful things, but I think some of his commentary in this video is truly brilliant.
Scene 1 I have this thing, apparently a lingering echo of a childhood illness, where massively disproportionate sizes freak me out - not just any disproportion of course, but where there's a difference that's "too big". For instance, the movie of Horton Hears a Who feels like a nightmare to me. I get a hint of this sometimes when I start to scale out from the terrain immediately present to my experience - to the region, the state, the country, etc. It's not every time that I think about the size of things, only when I approach it from a particular direction. But I definitely felt it several times in the first day or two of our trip as we paddled on for hours and hours and I knew that we were only covering a tiny loop in a massive region, which was only on the border of one state, and so on.
Scene 2 The first full day of the trip was easily the hardest for me: we paddled and portaged and waded through rapids for hours with no breaks and I'm kind of weak. When we reached our campsite in the late afternoon, I leaned against my pack in the sun and was totally content. But once the brunt of the exhaustion had passed, I grabbed my picturesque little moleskine and went to sit on the rocks at the edge of the lake and write poetry since that was obviously the aesthetically correct thing to do. And so I found myself frustrated and even discouraged when words absolutely refused to come together on my page. I sat in the frustration for a while before I realized that it was yet another result of a deep seated compulsion to be always doing something. As odd as I'm sure it sounds, this compulsion is the result of a belief that I have been fighting for quite some time now, namely that I have to earn my worth, it is not inherent to me. It may seem slightly dramatic, but it's a wide spread belief in our production focused culture, and I would imagine that if you look for it, you might find it cropping up in all sort of unexpected ways. I wasn't entirely sure how to proceed from this discovery, but I wrote in the blank space left by the absence of poetry "allow yourself to just be a person."
Scene 3 I didn't actually watch Jurassic Park until after my mom had played the theme music as we drove into Yosemite for the first time. Consequently, my primary association with that music will always be the awe awakened in me by beauty and granduer, and only as a far distant second do I ever remember that it's about dinosaurs. And so it has become an almost automatic cause of praise in me - with hardly any conscious choice, I find myself reorienting towards giving praise and thanks to the one who is Majesty and Beauty Himself. So when my friend, perched by the lake at our third campsite, played Jurassic Park on his tin whistle, a switch flipped in me, I remembered immediately and deeply that the weight of vastness that had been pressing down on me was the creation of a God who loved me. The wonder of this reality seeped into me slowly and strongly over the next few days.
Scene 4 At the end of a day spent relaxing on Lake Vera, we built on a bonfire on a tiny island in the middle of lake. The night was bright with the light of the full moon that glittered on the lake and we sang and talked and drank in the beauty of the wilderness. Near the end of the evening we sang the song (Red is the Rose) that has been a thread between all the different worlds I've lived in. As I sang the familiar words for the thousandth time, I heard them as a love song from God to each of us:
Red is the rose that in yonder garden grows
and fair is the lily of the valley
clear is the water that flows from the boyne
but my love is fairer than any
As glorious and great as His creation around us was, each one of us there were individually more precious to Him than all the beauty around us.
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