Insomnia

Hello, old friend. It's been a while.

(Hmmm, my blog is an old friend. You the reader are an old friend. Insomnia is an old friend. I enjoy inadvertent double--or triple in this case--entendre.

To bed at 11:00. Suddenly wide awake at 1:15. What to make of this?

I've been getting all kinds of grief lately for not blogging.

Here's what's on my mind:

The world needed death. It needed death as much as it needed life" (John Updike). I've been rolling ideas similar to this in my head all weekend. I saw an opera Thursday night that essentially told this story. That led me to Ecclesiastes. And then I uncover it again as I revisited some Updike stories this afternoon. I wonder how that life/death phenomenon plays itself out in small ways and simpler rhythms in life? Relationships ebb and flow. Days are good and bad. These are all little deaths, in a way.

Tom and I were talking about the New Life schedule over the coming weeks and months. I've got teaching dates planned and feel as if I have nothing to say. That possibility (and that emptiness) is on my mind.

A friend of mine has spent a couple weeks alone as his wife and child vacation in Florida. He's dealing with the emotional impact of loneliness for a few weeks. The empty house. The lack of structure. The freedom, yes, but also the quiet emptiness of having nothing to come home to. He asked me how I do it. How I live alone? How I define purpose without that significant relationship to drive my being. It's a good question. How do I do it? I'm thinking about how to answer that...

I revisited Camp Challenge over the weekend. What a cool thing memory is. I can picture the old scenes in my head. I can recall people and events and emotions and smells, even. But then to actually step into that scene again--when I actually stood there my memory seemed false, the reality brighter and bolder and muskier and shabbier than I ever would have recalled. It had been over ten years since I'd been there. A decade. And it felt like an instant. I wish I could have dialed back time and stepped back into those memories. It felt like it should have been just that easy. Oh how I would love to reexperience those times. If the reality of camp was that much brighter than my memory, how much has time dulled my memory of the emotional aspect?

Now I'm thinking about how it's become a habit to hang out at Camp Lebanon. In 2014 how will I look back on those times? (2014...that sounds crazy, doesn't it?)

What am I going to preach about on July 25? That's not really so far away...

Walking around the trails Saturday caused Jeremiah 6.16 to echo through my mind--and it still is. I linked to the NIV, but NRSV reads "...look and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies..." We all intuitively long for those ancient paths, don't we? We instinctively mistrust the modern and the "new and improved" world for good reason.

I'm thinking "there, I blogged." It's 2:00 time to try and sleep again.