The following scribbling was written about 1970 in my “den”, a 1955 Yellowstone travel trailer. “The Unfamiliar” has survived three moves and a lot more on the back of a Terry Andréa State Park map (Wisconsin). Funny how you write something in one set of emotions, then decades later read it and you recapture the feelings of that moment, if only for a moment. Peace…aloneness… joy…sadness… uncertainty… A composite of conflicting emotions, now history, but, for that moment, very real.
The Unfamiliar
I can touch and feel, can see, can smell, can taste and hear.
But it is the sixth sense that makes it all work.
What happens inside us when our senses tell us things?
It’s the sixth sense that takes us back to the woods, the lake, on a walk into solitude. A sixth sense deep inside that puts all the parts together and starts disturbingly warm, familiar and beautiful, so much like joy – it must be joy! So much like happiness – it must be happiness. So much like love…
We can view our whole life as a series of composite feelings collected and displayed in our soul, heart and mind…and our memory.
We have control over that and we can dictate what our senses will feel, taste, hear, smell and see.
But…mysteriously we cannot dictate how that collection of senses will be displayed at some future time nor how it will affect our soul or the gifts that God has given us.
So we must be careful not to rely only on the familiar and the known, but to expose ourselves to all that God allows in the time we have.
Our life, a series of sense composites? In the end, our life is what we have made of it. How we have used those gifts. What we have experienced. What we have allowed our sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing to give to us.
The variety is of our choosing, but the affect is not.
The time of choice is brief. I have experienced this time and place, and I seem to be ready now for…
The Unfamiliar.
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