Urgency
a curse, an antidote
It’s the thunderous clammer of horse and hoof beating down the track. Drawing nearer and nearer, and nearer still. So near you can feel the power, the speed. Not clip-clop, clip-clop; not gallop-trot, gallop-trot; but the increasing pace of Boom. Boom. Boom. And you run and stumble, and stumble and fall, and clamor back to your feet to run some more all the while trying to ignore the pulsating tremors of those heavy-hitting hooves vibrating through your very core. You feel that impending truth that they’re gaining and you’re slowing, you’re too tired, too frail, too beholden to things beyond that track. Failure awaits, inevitable.
And sweat trickles down the tip of your nose and you catch it with your tongue and it’s salty, like the drop of the ocean you are—a solitary blink-and-you-miss-it moment awash in a vastness beyond comprehension. So why even bother? Who are you, really?
It’s the fog of the formless ghosts that muddle your mind as you stumble onward, hands outstretched in a frantic dance of avoidance. You continue to fall forward, to ricochet off the countless obstacles necessarily in your path, some twisted game of pinball that no one has the decency to unplug. And so you bounce back and forth, off this wall and into the next, praying for forward motion—forward falling—and for the strength to stand back up once you’ve finally collapsed into something solid. If you ever can collapse into anything at all or perhaps you’ve been cursed to keep bouncing, keep ricocheting, keep tumbling about a board of someone else’s making.
And I wonder if that’s not urgency in a nutshell: a constant outpacing of horses and a constant drowning in comparison and a constant bumbling about a gameboard with no winners just a never-ending array of cute obstructions and clamoring noise and blaring lights and sheer sensory overload until it all blinks to black.
What stirs the horses to run? What fills the ocean’s great depths? What creativity designed the game?
And I wonder: Can curiosity dilute that impulse to urgency? Can it push our tired feet off the track and into the soft grass and allow us to sit a while and watch and wonder and dream? Can we see in the horses not just something to be outrun but creatures alive and beautiful? In the ocean not just a vastness against which to prove our muster but a depth of all-encompassing mystery? In the game not just a will to succeed but a marvel at the design?
We can try and run forever. Or we can delight in the forever that skips around us, always.
And another thing:
The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power wrapped its second season this past week. Spoiler alert: I loved it. You can check out my thoughts on the season, on that big character reveal, and on how I found watching Rings of Power to be a religious experience in and of itself over at NCR. Give it a read.
I’m looking forward to hanging out with folks at the third annual LegendHaven aka “the epic, online convention for fun, faith, fandoms, & fiction,” hosted by
of LegendFiction. You should totally come, too. You can learn more here, and check out what I’ll be up to here.And finally, I played BINGO in a church basement in Wiikwemkoong, an unceded territory of the Anishinaabe in Ontario, Canada last week. You can read about that, too.