HEAVENLY SPOTLIGHTS: A Room with a View

One can see the most amazing things from the front window, without even having to rise from the recliner. Some use the giant, mind-numbing flatscreen tv as their window. Some prefer the rear window, and glimpses of wife-murderers and other mysteries. I'll stick with the front view. More edifying.

I haven't had a television most of my adult life, and didn't grow up with one in the family livingroom, as the centerpiece and gathering point of life in the house. This doesn't make me superior, or in any way wiser. There are more ways to be an idiot by choice than there are cable channels, and that's saying a lot. Just that Teleos-vision is more my style. The view of the sea and the sky from my window is a form of perfection, as in something complete, lacking nothing, whole in and of itself. I'd rather be attracted to the high places, the places of brightness and colour, than to those dank, spelunkian, torch-lite dungeons inhabited by television. True, by my own choice I have not plumbed the half-centimeter depths of the American sitcom, or the latest too clever British humour offering; I have never watched Albania's Got Talent! and I live without game shows. I am denied the pseudo-analytics of the polished but uneducated suits and hairdos of corporate altnewsland. The jabber-jabber of the pundit does not assail my ears.

I think I can live with this lack.

Or maybe I can live because of this lack . . .

The Red Chair of Courage

Anyone who takes the time put a chair at the end of a concrete pier under construction can't be all bad. Staring out at the ocean is an art, the art of emptyness, in a good sense of the word. One is left open to big thoughts about life and self and all kinds of other meanings-fraught notions. No one looks out at the waves and thinks of bonds and stocks and jobs and pillories, or schemes an aweful thing. The edge-of-pier folk seek not this or that specific thought, but rather solace, a restorative moment, a little peace, and what ever else comes naturally to the living waters-calmed physic of endlessly ailing modern man. Here at pier's edge we may learn as much what we are not, as what we are. It takes guts, of a kind, to let the mind wander out over the ocean far enough to look back with some perspective, at the person sitting in the red chair of courage.