Author: Bev

I saw a poignant saying recently on social media, which sparked a memory.  It was, “You’re going to need oil in your lamp.  It’s getting dark out there.”

Instantly I remembered a really singable song from my youth church days.  Either it was from church camp or it was from one of those spiritually invigorating evening services intended to awaken a sleepy church.

The chorus I recall went like this, “Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning; give me oil in my lamp, I pray.  Give me oil in my lamp keep me burning, keep me burning ‘til the break of day.”  The song was really catchy, as I guess it was supposed to be (E. Sevison, Lyricist).

About oil, there are all kinds of it.  Oil can be used to grease up a gear or other mechanism that has become stuck in its working.  Oil rejuvenates our joints or anything else in or on our bodies that has lost or worn out its flexibility or natural pliability.

Oil is a vital source of fuel, which powers our bodies and our human-made society.  Fossil fuel, can you say dinosaurs, plant fuel, from corn, other grains, vegetables, flowers and what have you, come from the earth around us.  We need to just tend it, and harvest it.

It’s harvest time, people.  I know in rural America; we celebrate the seasons.  Often those celebrations highlight plants or fruits as symbols of the season.  In the autumn we see a proliferation around the countryside of rich and earthy-colored pumpkins and other gourds, corn stalks, bales of hay, apples, and deep and darkly saturated colors in chrysanthemums.

It’s getting darker by the minute, it seems, as the days of autumn progress.  Daylight is dwindling and our moods grow slightly more somber to match the darker days.

We wear more black, brown, and earth colors, in the fall.  Gone, is the rule to stop wearing white after Labor Day, but aside from a bit of “winter white,” white or other light and pastel colors just don’t speak for our frame of mind this time of year.

We definitely need oil in our lamps to keep us going until the break of day, or spring daybreak as it seems.  So not only literal darkness is coming in increments of a minute or more a day, so is cultural darkness.

Speaking of cultural darkness, I don’t understand quite why we must maintain the cultural construct of Daylight Savings Time.  You know, the “fall-back, spring-forward” clock changing ritual that we follow in most of the United States.

I honestly don’t get it, as an east coast person, why when it gets dark at six o’clock in the evening the way our clocks are set now, we have to set them artificially back an hour making it dark at five o’clock!  Do you know what that means to older people?

We have to fight to stay awake until eight o’clock in the evening, eight o’clock!  I was used to setting out for a walk at seven in the evening, but very soon, my slippers and robe will be beckoning me at seven-thirty.

Humans created Daylight Savings Time.  Why do we have such a hard time changing it back?  It’s just too sensible, I guess.  A few years ago, someone in Congress offered a bill to do just that.  It was tabled by someone out west, I think.  Oh, my heavens, we can’t even agree on what time it is.

Why such darkening?  Some say it’s a spiritual thing.  Others claim it’s totally a human construct, quite by accident or inattention.  Yet others believe it’s a conscious effect of intention, for whatever reason.

At any rate, we need oil in our lamps folks.  We need light for the path ahead.  We need fuel to power the way forward.  How we obtain this oil is a matter of contention, and by nature, refining it is not a pretty process.

We don’t all agree about how to proceed in the darkness.  We agree that it’s getting darker and we need light, but now what?

It’s of little point to fuss over how we got here or why it’s dark.  The fuss begins, however, with specifically what to do now.

We’ve used up our oil.  Forgive us for spilling the oil given to us.  Show us how to refuel without retribution, remorse or regret.

None of us is wise enough to know how to refuel a nation stuck in division.  But I am wise enough to know the only way to unstick the mechanism that is America, is some pretty fragrant and potent oil.

All I can plead is, “Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning…. keep me burning ’til the break of day.”  Sooner, rather than later, please.

 

The song lyric, “ground control to major Tom,” comes readily to mind when I think of control.   So does the hymn lyric, “I surrender all.”  As does the Serenity Prayer.  I’m guessing even though all these reminders should help us to stop trying to control every little thing in our lives, we stubbornly persist in the habit of it.

In 1969, David Bowie wrote “Space Oddity,” which is maybe about surrendering control by cutting off communication with ground control.  A constant barrage of suggestions, information, this opinion and that one, orders from the boss, pretty pictures of pretty people and pretty things, tempt most of us to unplug the communications.

“Space Oddity” starts out with the quote from above and further on it says “this is Major Tom to ground control….  For here am I sittin’ in my tin can far above the world, planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.”  It might feel okay to unplug and let go.

There are all kinds of control but the prominent kind in my mind, is basic restraint.  Either we’re being restrained beyond our will (controlled), being restrained for our safety (under control), or exercising self-restraint for the purpose of discipline and the building of character.  One of the biblical fruits of the Spirit, is the virtue of (self-control).

Recently I had an opportunity to spend some time at “the beach.”  Watching the ebb and flow of the waves, tides, and water, was educational for this observer.  It was easy to accept that I had zero control over the powerful process of the ocean’s movements.

On social media I shared a short video of what seemed like layer upon layer of gray and white and tan from the sky to the ocean, its waves, and sand.  The robust waves tumbled one after the other toward the beach in one of the most controlled examples of power, imaginable.

The sound of water is soothing, when it’s controlled.  Two of the basic elements of life, air and water, under control, dominate white noise machines and can soothe our busy minds and help us to relax or fall asleep with greater ease.

When the noise of life with its constant barrage of communication, in whatever form, gets to be too much, I think we need something larger than life to settle us down.  Few humans, like “Major Tom,” get to go to space to get some space from the noise of life.  We need to listen to an ocean, a river, a stream or fountain.  Or go to a quiet aquarium, if you must.

We may need to putter in, walk through, and look at a garden, a forest, an arboretum.  We should probably smell some flowers, observe the grandeur of trees that tower above us, look at clouds and the entire expanse of the sky.

People need people but we need more than people, society, politics, problems, business, commerce.  I think we need to get off the highway from time to time, and walk the path, for respite and perspective.

It’s so easy to get bogged down in controlling one snippet after another snippet of procuring the food and finances of our daily lives.  I wonder if once in a while we need to glimpse an ocean or vast canyon or giant forest – stuff that is obviously beyond our control, to bring us back to peace.

The Serenity Prayer is essentially about humans accepting limits to our capacity to control what happens.  We can do something about some things.  We need wisdom, however, to know when and under what circumstances, to accept the things we cannot control; when to let go.

It should be a universal goal for us to learn to discern between what is an ocean and what is a pool, among the circumstances we face in life.  One is there to teach us to calm down, stop trying so hard against the tide, and dwell in peace at the vastness of it.  The other is to show us that we’re capable of navigating it even if it’s dicey, sketchy, deep, or muddy.

Some of us, maybe more than others, have trouble regulating our internal control mechanism in response to the external stimuli of life.  We do better with some sort of outside controls in place to even out the ups and downs and prevent the spread of an undesirable outcome.  Parents, friends, spouses, or employers can fill this role.

When personal control exceeds its boundaries, it’s a problem.  For example, when you’ve controlled your own environment and then succumb to the temptation to control the environment of others, you need to let go.  If you’re judging what is best, good, or right about somebody else’s behavior or lifestyle, you’d better step back and stick to your own corner of the universe.

Jennifer DeWeil said, “Control is the enemy of rest…. When things feel out of control, our tendency is to hold tighter, grip harder, or work more.”  I say, stop trying.  It’s exhausting. 

I once had a relative at risk for dehydration and all manner of unseemly repercussions from such dehydration.  She didn’t drink enough water.  We practically begged her to drink more water.  We’d place a glass of water in front of her and ask her respectfully to drink it.  She often said, “I’m trying.”  To us, it seemed simple, “don’t try to drink it.  Just drink it.”

Let the power and peace of the ocean have its way with you.  We can’t restrain it anyway, so we might as well let it go.

“Sweet dreams are made of this.  I travel the world and the seven seas.  Everybody’s looking for something….”  So said Annie Lennox (David Allan Stewart), the Eurythmics, a few years ago (1983).

All the song lyric experts have varied opinions about what those lyrics mean, and I don’t know for certain, but I think it’s a bit of dream interpretation.  We literally travel the world in some of our more fanciful and sweet dreams.  Lennox goes on to refer to some of the more negative dreams where people are using us, and some of the other anxieties of life, but sweet dreams reflect the best of our emotional life.

Don’t you love it, though, when you have a dream that makes you smile, feel encouraged, appreciated, cared for, and hopeful?  Those are the sweet dreams.  The origin of the word, dreams, dates from 1200-1250, meaning “joy, mirth, gladness.” Hm

Hopes and dreams seem tied together.  What is it about dreams that make hope their most prominent buddy?

There are a couple of definitions for “dreams.”  One has to do with a fanciful or concocted scenario of the future.  It’s a hopeful but largely unreal vision of excellence in your life.  This is the concept of dreams that Roy Orbison sang about, in the first part of Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream), in 1962 (Cindy Walker, songwriter).  “Dream baby got me dreamin’ sweet dreams the whole day through.”  

The other definition of dreams, has to do with a mental activity, usually in the form of an imagined series of events, occurring during certain phases of sleep.  This type of dream is what Orbison meant with the lyrics in the second part of Dream Baby, “Dream baby got me dreamin’ sweet dreams in nighttime too….”

I wonder how these two different definitions of dreams are related.  I think perhaps the common denominator of both types of dreams is, hope.  Thusly, the reference to “sweet dreams.”

Why do we pray for sweet dreams?  From Proverbs 3 – “When you lie down, you will not be afraid; Yes, you will lie down and your sleep will be sweet.”

When we wish someone “sweet dreams,” it’s a blessing.  In my opinion, pronouncing “sweet dreams” to someone, punctuates their day with a perfect period.

My writing is a case of recording what happens to be going on currently in my head rather than some crafted work of creative writing.  I think my dreams are similar.  Are dreams just simply dramatically-set spill-over from waking life?

Dreams, in my view, aren’t some executive producer’s concocted symbolism, meant to express a deep concept.  Yet that’s how we’re supposed to interpret them, according to some dream experts.

Dreams truly are movies which are made up of symbols for feelings.  So, the bottom line of a movie or show isn’t so much that the girl gets the guy or the cop gets the perp or the soldier wins the war.

Rather it’s that good overcomes evil, love conquers fear, the turtle wins the race, the beaten-down rise up, and hope can’t be suppressed forever.

In this sense, dreams are movies and we are executive producers, who sometimes really deserve an Oscar for our dream content.  Dream symbols may reveal emotional material which we aren’t ready to confront readily or just yet, in our waking life.  Quite possibly, dreams are meant to ease us into a reality that’s brewing beneath the surface.

Some dreams are subtle, others are obvious.  Once in a while a dream is so memorable that we’re startled by it and remember it easily upon awakening.  It’s usually the shocking, absurd or scary dreams that we wake from and have to tell someone about.  But we “forget” most of our daily dreams.

So, cheers to getting your anxieties or conflicting emotions out in a few confusing dreams.  But most of your dreams, I hope reflect the best of your emotional life, spilling out in the sweetest of dreams.

Some sayings resonate with you and others don’t.  “Everything happens for a reason,” doesn’t.  “You do you,” does.

There’s something about “everything happens for a reason,” that doesn’t work for me.  It just feels like a desperate attempt to explain the inexplicable.

Of course there is a reason for everything, but we aren’t always privy to that reason.  Sometimes it’s just not worth banging your head against the wall trying to find answers to the question “why.”

I’ve lived long enough to realize that I can live a lot longer accepting some mystery in life.  I don’t have to know or understand everything.  Also, I don’t ask “why” nearly as often these days as I used to.  I’ve learned to live with a measure of acceptance of stuff I just cannot control.

I keep a note paper on my office desk, a saying attributed to Laura Jean Truman.  It serves as a reminder, which I don’t always heed, that I am not God and I don’t have super-human ability to control everything that I want to.  “You can’t heal people you love.  You can’t make choices for them.  You can’t rescue them.  You can promise that they won’t journey alone.  You can loan them your map.  But this trip is theirs.”

In fact, “it is what it is,” is another oft heard saying that suits me.  Michael J Fox said that “acceptance doesn’t mean resignation but the understanding that something is what it is and there’s got to be a way through it.”  Now that makes sense to me.

I’m a believer in a Christian notion that God doesn’t just whisk believers out of hard or impossible circumstances because we’re His children or His friends.  I’ve tested that theory more than a few times in life.

Instead, God has our backs through hard times, never leaving nor forsaking us.  It’s way cool to have a “friend” in high places, to know someone.

I really like the permission that “you do you,” gives us to live our lives the best way that we see fit.  The concept reflects a commitment to keep your judgments to yourself.  You’re telling everybody whom you encounter to “be yourself,” “you do you.”

In terms of self-permission to be yourself, do you always know who “you” are?  Early in the Spring, I took some notes which I titled, “You Who?”  I was in a position to seek a diagnosis for a small myriad of surprise maladies.

It felt somewhat like, if you’re old enough you will get the reference to dwelling in “The Twilight Zone.”  It feels like I turned around in a fairy-tale, fog kind of thing, and I’m like this.

The advice, “you do you,” is hard to follow when you don’t yet recognize you in this manifestation of you.  Along the way, you deal with doctors, and you pass people who buck the health care system to forge an alternative path.  But the thing is, none of this is you.

You feel slightly desperate to find answers to questions you don’t know who to ask.  You think, “this is not cancer, stop winching about every little thing.”  You might sound like a freaking, raving, lunatic, who is not you.  Who are you?

I’ve made a decision to be myself in a fluid kind of way.  I’m trying to stay receptive to the point of view of others yet keep my own counsel, so to speak.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said it best, “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.  Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.  A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages…”  In other words, you be you, and don’t wholly depend upon the experts who wish to guide your life from without.

Nobody knows you like you do.  The Scripture in I Corinthians 2, verse 11 confirms this, “For what person knows the thoughts and motives of a man except the man’s spirit within him?”

So, even when all manner of mysterious happenings hover over your life, take heart to know that not only are you not alone, but you can trust yourself.  You be you and hang in there until another manifestation of you emerges from within and do that you.

Have you ever fallen for a scam?  The word, scam came from U.S. carnival slang and was first used in 1958.  I guess prior to that date people were honest?

A scam is a dressed-up trick or sleight of hand, designed to look real.  It’s fraud, plain and simple and designed entirely to make money off of the unsuspecting. 

I grew up hearing synonyms of the scam as being rooked, gipped, shortchanged, or conned.  It all has to do with money, more specifically taking yours through fraudulent means.

What about spam?  The word, spam in its popular use is from a Monty Python sketch in which the canned pork product was referenced as being everywhere, unavoidable, and repetitive.  So, spam in today’s parlance is junk mail or nuisance phone calls, texts or emails sent out in bulk to reach anybody who will bite.  The purpose of spam advertising is commercial, or to make money.

Spam doesn’t directly steal your money like a scam, but it steals your time.  And time is money, right?  I spend a significant amount of time in my work day, sorting emails into what’s real, what’s spam but maybe worthy of a second look, and what’s just plain nonsense.

Trying to unsubscribe from certain spam emails, and don’t get me started on the uselessness of the “do not call” list, is difficult if not impossible.  After all, scams are meant to trap you into giving information or purchasing something that you did not initiate.  They are called a “come-on.”

Earning money, making a living, selling and buying, are all legitimate commercial and social endeavors which fuel a capitalistic economy.  We all benefit from money.

An oft misquoted Scripture is from Paul to his mentee, Timothy, about the love of money.  Based on this Scripture, people frequently say that money is the root of all evil.

As in the one little letter of difference between the words, spam and scam, Paul warned Timothy that money is not the root of all evil, but the love of money that is at the core of much that is evil in the world.  One word in a sentence can change the whole meaning of the stated idea.  This is the case with the I Timothy 6:10 Scripture.

What is the love of money?  The fancy word for it is pleonexia, “the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others.”  It’s greed; wanting money more than you want God, or people, or goodness or kindness, etc.

Before you quickly cast stones toward the rich, the relatively poor are equally capable of loving money as those who are relatively rich.  I’m reminded of John D. Rockefeller, at one time one of the richest men in the world, who answered the question, “when would you consider that you have enough money,” with “one more dollar.”

In fact, lack of what one perceives as enough money, can make you hungry, even starved for more, so much so that you will do almost anything to get it.  Even people with sound moral and ethical principles, will contemplate an easy answer to offset lack.

Chasing after riches is probably at the root of much crime and lawlessness in the world.   Even legitimate businesses scam us with “just legal” practices that exploit our vulnerability.  If you need a product or service, you are at the mercy of those qualified to help.  Some of them will take advantage of your desperation.  Can you say seven hundred dollars to fix a refrigerator ice maker?

Have you ever felt like a fool for falling for it?  You’ve heard the saying, “fool me once shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me?”  Well, when the scammers change their tactics or tug at your heart-strings, you are never a fool, even if it’s a third, fourth or twentieth time.

Scams prey on kind-hearted people with the best of intentions to change their circumstances in some way, to  help others, or to save money.  Lost animals and lost children can sometimes be scams.  Why?  Because people care.

In commercial scams we’re usually expected to make a quick or hasty decision, with a time-limit.  Beware of free trials.  And, grandparents, get a call-back number before sending bail-money over the phone to get your grandchild out of jail.  That’s not how the real process works.

Advertising fuels our economy.  We’re all familiar with pretty images catching our eye and our attention.  We may not need or even want thus and such, but a mouth-watering picture of a steaming burger, makes you hungry for one.  An image of a family vacationing on a yacht makes you really hanker for a vacation on the water, even if you get seasick on a pond.

So, are most ads scams?  I guess one might say yes considering they use perfect models who could literally wear a feed-sack and look good in it, to sell you clothing that no way on earth you can pull off.  It’s in one sense a trick of the eye.  It looks great on her/him but when you try it on, not so much.  The steaming hot burger that looked oversized and delicious in the ad, comes out of your sack, flat, lukewarm and kind of sad.

I’m wondering if we can better live with spam and scams, if we’re aware of them.  It takes a certain alertness that frankly, sometimes we don’t have in the barrage of email, phone calls, and texts, that we all receive on a daily basis.

One part of me wants to unsubscribe and be rid of spam, but the practical part of me has learned to just hit delete, every day.  Stay alert out there and polish your scam-guard.

I’m a little bit miffed with my experience with nature lately.  Having recently met with an outdoorsy illness from a spider bite, I’m not keen at the moment with the great outdoors.

Some people are outdoorsy, others are not.  Who do you picture when you think of the word, outdoorsy?  Someone skiing down a mountainside?  A person dressed in flannel, chopping firewood?

When you think of “outdoorsy,” I’m guessing you don’t picture a person attached to an IV bag filled with antibiotics, fighting off the effects of a spider bite.  Or, you don’t think of the person carrying an inhaler or oxygen tank, trying their best to breathe through the fog of particles in the air.

“Outdoorsy” elicits images of vitality, movement and synchrony with nature.  We’re talking free-range chickens, not the ones cooped up indoors.

Two instances come to mind when I think of the outdoors.  First is from a television show that I enjoyed quite a few years ago.  It was a comedic detective show starring a man named Monk, who was afflicted with somewhat severe OCD.  The line that I remember was something like, “nature’s all over me, get it off,” as he frantically brushed leaves or some such “dirt” off of his jacket.

Notice that people who are not so fond of nature, would definitely call soil, dirt.  Folks who are keen on nature, would possibly call dirt, earth or something similarly holistic.

The other great outdoors thing that my husband and I often reference comes from the great French post-impressionist artist, Paul Cezanne.  Comparing the beautifully lit, nature-rich Aix en Provence to Paris, which he called “nature starched and tormented.”   Have you ever noticed people, who’ve chosen to live surrounded by nature, sweeping the dirt and vacuuming the leaves outside?

Nature and the outdoors are considered entirely in the eye of the beholder.  Nature, for instance, is not all roses, bunnies, bluebirds, fawns, and soft beds of leaves.  It’s also decay, thorns, ticks, vultures, and hornets.

Zero degrees and 95 degrees Fahrenheit are the most hideous extremes.  I’m reminded though, that all the complaining in the world won’t change the discomfort we feel at these extremes that are natural to the summer and winter seasons.  That’s nature.  It’s probably human nature to complain about it.

Some people are oblivious to nature until some aspect of it hurts them.  Maybe they get a sunburn, suffer respiratory torment from breeze-borne plant reproduction, gesundheit by the way, itchy skin from this bug bite or that, a deer obliterates the hood of their car, a bird poops on their car window, a porcupine sends their dog to the vet, a root finds its way into their living space, etc.

Then there are folks who make sport of nature with hiking, boating, floating, rambling, hunting, skiing, fishing, planting, gardening, seeding, feeding, watching, preserving, conserving, and protecting it.  These humans are probably first thought of when you mention “outdoorsy.”

Nature and the great outdoors are double edged swords.  They’re not one or the other, they cut both ways.

Nature can be both heartbreaking to the human soul as well as delightful beyond description.  Animals can be terrorists as well as the most beautiful creatures ever made.  Nature is the very definition of dichotomy.

Nature is by definition suitable to the outdoors.  Spiders, ticks, mosquitoes, raccoons, bees, snakes, foxes, and such belong outdoors.  I’ve always felt somewhere down deep that we humans have invaded on the natural territory of these species.  Then there’s the Genesis scripture that tells humans to subdue and take dominion of these co-conspirators of the earth.

I think in twenty-first century earth, we humans just once in a while crave the simple, uncluttered life of nature.  We may want for a moment to trade in the conveniences and distractions of civilization because these things can literally make us sick.

We sometimes want to participate in the reality of nature in a “life imitates art” kind of way.  Because in art, nature is perfect and beautiful.  But nature, in reality, can be devastatingly intrusive to the civilized way of life of us folks acculturated to convenience and comfort.

When spiders come indoors, bees sting, ticks bite us, and mosquitoes infect us with disease, nature is seen to have gone too far.  In summary, when the great outdoors comes indoors, we humans rebel against her.  She’s only to enter indoors by invitation.

We invite nature indoors via house plants, stuffed animals, domesticated pets, books, and home-extensions such as porches, decks and window gardens.  We have taken that Genesis scripture and domesticated it to our twenty-first century liking, subduing nature and making it work for us and not against us.

Thank God for medicines, many of which are derived in some way from nature, much of it essentially homeopathic at its core.  We seem to work with nature to fight nature and that’s the direction we’ve gone.  I guess, in that sense, we’re all outdoorsy.  We’re indoor-outdoor carpet, so lie down and enjoy it.

Note to self, look up the origins of the phrase, “The tall and the short of it.”  This was one of those rare times when I completely had it wrong.

There is no such phrase.  Correctly, the phrase is “the long and the short of it.”

Okay, that changes things, or does it?  This should really be the editor’s motto because it is a noun phrase that means that you’re making a brief statement telling only the most important parts of something.

That’s what an editor does.  We slash long passages of prose from wordy originals into concise and to the point masterpieces – or so we think.

I am an editor in my day job.  Specifically, I edit front and back matter in collections of music and sometimes the body of longer books, with lots of prose.

When I’m editing someone else’s work it’s relatively easy to see the forest from the trees and cut out all of the “extra” material in order to let the most important parts stand out and shine.  The writer or owner of that material thinks every tree in the entire forest is important or it just isn’t the forest that they know and love.

My second job, and frankly my favorite one is as an essayist.  An essayist is probably by definition, verbose and the bane of an editor.  We do like to elaborate.  There are lots of trees in our forest, and of many varieties.

My work is therefore a contradiction in terms and from time to time is reflected in my columns.  I’m getting better at self-editing but once in a while I’m compelled to go on and on, impressed with one idea after another.

For example, a good editor would probably have slashed my first paragraph describing how I started this column idea with an erroneous assumption about a non-existent phrase.  This is not important material.  However, it’s interesting material to an essayist.

This essayist will tell you something I find interesting albeit not important.  I don’t think interesting things are necessarily unimportant, even though they are often completely random.  For instance, why do you think I mixed up the tall and the short of it with the long and the short of it?

Tall and short, fat and skinny, manic and depressive, big and small… are all on a spectrum of extremes.  I suppose that makes average or normal, the standard, maybe even the goal.  But I’m increasingly not sure that’s my goal in life.

Freud would probably say I have a problem with being short, or brief or concise or even average.  I want to tell the long story and avoid making the long story short, if I can.  It’s not as much fun.

You’ve seen the image of a domestic kitten looking into a mirror, seeing a lion looking back at him.  Well, this editor looks into a mirror and sees an essayist looking back at me.  Or maybe more colorfully and with my lame attempt at a walked into a bar joke, an editor walks into a bar, drinks too many words, gets happy drunk on ideas, and comes out an essayist.

They say that if a hiker crosses the path of a bear, you should stand as tall as you can, look big, and ominous.  Look as bog-footy as you can.  That’s what that kitten-to-lion does in his mirror.

When you’re encouraging someone to “stand tall,” you’re telling them to stretch, have courage, go forth, and conquer.  This is proven to work in the form of the fake smile.  If you’re sad or having a bad day and you force or fake a smile, the very act of the smile articulation causes a surge of happy hormones.

Usually in the end, both sides of my writing personality conjoin and I present a work that you can and want to read in less than an afternoon.  Sometimes that may be a tall order, or even a tall tale, but one thing I won’t give you is short shrift.

I would wager that editors sleep better than essayists.  This essayist slept two hours then awakened thinking, “I need to work on that ‘standing tall’ column.”  When six a.m. rolled around, some research was completed and the long and the short of it never materialized, but a nice million-word essay developed.

Perhaps tomorrow night the editor will get her essential eight hours of sleep, satisfied that the most important material was covered and the point made.  She kept the word count reasonable and she cut out a few of the fun puns that the essayist originally wanted really badly to include.

There was a sacrifice made to make the long and the short of it.  But she looks in the mirror and, in the end, it turns out she’s standing tall after all.