As I sit here prettily poised with nimble fingers gently tapping my computer keyboard, the digital clock’s stick figures mime with precision the position indicating the hour of two. Though the night is dark and the hour late, with poetry, prose and visions of readership accolades dancing in my head, I have come up blank. This is not the first time that such has happened with a deadline hovering just beyond the breaking of dawn. It is what is known to the addiction of my choice as “writer’s block.”
When this happens, I do what I got into the habit of doing; I go outside and I plunk my butt on the broad board of the heavily roped swing that dangles from the lowest limb of a giant century old maple which towers to great height in our humble back yard.
This swing was originally placed at the request of my Little Lady. She loved to swing. It was a childhood addiction that clung through to the very end of her life.
It was at her suggestion, a few years previous, when I complained of being stuck for a topic, that I go out and have a good swing. “Commune with nature,” her words, not mine. It worked; she was right as usual. And it worked again in her absence. The thoughts that came to mind centred mainly on an article that I had just retyped for the fourth in the series of books that I am, in spare moments, assembling.
Though written greater than ten years previous, its foresight echoes precisely today. It was titled Fear, and in part I will quote:
“If you were to have asked an ice age man at the turn of the previous millennium, of in what he believed, he would have hesitated little in furrowing his heavy knit brow and answering, ‘We do not believe. We only fear. We fear those things which are about us and of which we have no sure control.’ Now I know that, in the overall scheme of things, the human generations are short, but does it not seem to you that in all this time, man has changed little, if any?
“Do we not, to this day, fear most of all the secret misdoings of the heedless ones among ourselves? Even the social scientist would have to admit that the creature gifted with the expanded cranium has done little more than taken a lengthy arm’s swing down from the branches among which he once safely swung. Having self-clothed, by religious taught shame, the meagerly haired body recognized by the evolutionist as the naked ape. But in reality have we, as a species, strayed little from being that of animal? Too often it is seen by our political tax grabs the gleam of the beast of prey. Few animals prey on creatures of their own kind.
“Not at all unlike animals, we live in fear. We fear the water we drink. We fear the quality of the air we breathe and the insecticides that are indiscriminately dusted over the fruits and veggies that we eat. We fear the genetically altered food sources in our factory farming of both plant and animal.
“There are those in the know among us who tell us that our entire eco-system is dying. Our style of living must be changed, our actions reversed. Within this new millennium would it not be nice if this creature known as man could take a long look at himself in the mirror and then sit down and rethink his thinking? Would it not be nice to stop cowering in our man-made caves and start living? Living the lives that God intended when he granted dominion. When dominion over was granted did it not include ourselves, our lusts, our cruelty, as well as our greed?
“I think it long overdue and definitely not before time, that the naked ape sits down and rethinks that which God has graciously granted.”
Take care, ‘cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-843-4544