Snow

It's snowing here, which in East Texas is about as common as a fundamentalist Christian Democrat. Parking lots and otherwise forgotten lawns drenched two inches deep in a blanket of clouds, bone-numbing but beautiful. The snow symbolizes pretty newness, and while I was enthralled with it as if it was a modern miracle (as were my mother, my brother, my girl, and all my neighbors with at least a residue of a capacity for laughter), breathing in the cold, pervaded with a spirit of childhood, I wondered why the three other elements couldn't also be so awed and praised when they showed their faces during our commonplace days. And I realized at the same moment what black spell clothes the spirit of adulthood.

Answer: a sensate nomadism, the look for the evernew and a repulsion with the same. Children can find everything to do with a stack of blocks, whereas millionaire adults burn out their souls on all the difference the world can throw at them. The grown ups (read, the smaller-than-children) have forgotten how to look; all they see is what works for them, their plans, their desires, their whitewashed goals. Let me try an arbitrary example from the story of an ex-marine-turned-anti-war-activist, reflecting on his training days for the Vietnam War:

In my own case, it was the way I looked at the world around me. A year earlier, I would have seen the rolling Virginia countryside through the eyes of an English major who enjoyed reading the Romantic poets. Now I had the clearer, more pragmatic vision of an infantry officer. Landscape was no longer scenery to me, it was terrain, and I judged it for the tactical rather than aesthetic value. Having been drilled constantly to look for cover and concealment, I could see dips and folds in a stretch of ground that would have appeared utterly flat to a civilian. If I saw a hill--"high ground"--I automatically began planning how to attack or defend it, my eyes searching for avenues of approach and fields of fire. A woodland meadow held no picturesque beauty for me. Instead, it presented a potential menace. If I came upon one, my first instincts were to figure out how to get a platoon safely across the exposed ground and how best to deploy the men: in a wedge, a combat-V, or line or skirmishers, two squads up and done back. -- Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War

Of course, in the daily drudgery of real life, the change from intrinsic appreciation for the world never turns so quickly to a utilitarian playground. It happens so slowly in daily living that we hardly ever notice it, and before long, after all the bloated goals of the American dream so starvingly grasped for have come to pass--after the house, the car, the wife, the collection of stocks, the perception of buying power--, there it is, etched into the being of Everyman: a tragic, terrible, lacerating loss of one's soul for a world that cannot be loved without it.

The answer to this, the answer to one of the handful of essential answers of life, is appreciation, which is possible only through awareness. The children have it, and for a while they can't help but have it. Consider Chesterton's quip on romanticism and realism with regard to the child: "When we are very young we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door." That desire for adventure that fuels the fire of a child's wonder at a dragon is swerved off course some time when society gets a hold on him and tells him, e.g., how to be a man, how to be a woman, how to be an American, or whatever other dark lies culture places on a pedestal of false goodness.

But think again of snow in an East Texas town. For a moment in realizing this rare occurrence to pass, we again become little children, witnessing with that so cool, so euphoric feeling a part of the world for the first time. What God can tell you whisperingly, what the universe can tell you with a little patience and resignation of the instrumentalization drive that turns the infinite number of things that make up the world into little culprits to satisfy our schemes, is that you can have this same feeling for everything--absolutely everything--if you become as a child, and learn to see the change that invites our pause and silent praise with the pseudo-sameness that greets us every day while we sleepwalk by in pursuit of a dreary dream.

Wake up. The knocking at your self that you disregard by the rules of society is being made by paradise, and you need another hand finding much needed firewood for your soul.