the long choosing

My main man Wendell Berry has been blowing my mind lately. I'm Reading a short novel called Remembering and though it causes me not to remember but to imagine it seems to be accomplishing it's task.

Been thinking in many different directions lately. Spent some time pondering lifestyle and the choices I make and how I would change them. Maybe it's the down home nature of Wendell Berry or maybe not, either way I've been imagining being a little closer to the tangible things like dirt and trees and a little farther from the technology stuff like computers and iphones. More on that another time.

I'm turning 27 in a few days here, if that's not the downhill side towards 30 I don't know what is. Been thinking about that too. I always joke about it but it actually doesn't bother me at all just so long as those three years bring some change with them. That, combined with getting married has made me think a lot about people's life cultures, which combine and turn into family cultures, which produce fine little ones that grow to big ones and, influenced by their family, develop their own life culture. I think of these things because I want to be conscious of the life culture I'm creating right now and what kind of culture I'm working towards with my wife. So as I turned to the next chapter in my book I was struck to read this...

"...That he is who he is and no one else is the result of a long choosing, chosen and chosen again. He thinks of the long dance of men and women behind him, most of whom he never knew, some he knew, two he yet knows, who, choosing one another, chose him. He thinks of the choices, too, by which he chose himself as he now is. How many choices, how much dance, how much error, how much hope have made that place and people that, in turn, made him? He does not know. He knows that some who might have left chose to stay, and that some who did leave chose to return, and he is one of them. Those choices have formed in time and place the pattern of a membership that chose him, yet left him free until he should choose it, which he did once, and now has done again."

Maybe the dance that makes up your family's history is not a good one. Maybe it is. Most likely it's some combination of both. Maybe there have been major defining moments in your tribes history. Or maybe it's been a steady ride. Whatever makes up the enormous history on which you stand it's brought you to this place, now. Some steady, some teetering but all in some way or another standing on the shoulders of those who've chosen before. I am there with my own choices that all make up my "long choosing" and I wonder at where that will take me for the next 27 years and who, by that time, will be climbing onto my shoulders.

cheers to fall, a crisp breeze, crunchy leaves and the sound of the creek at dusk.

a.