Slicer

Random, mundane experience #1: Cheese slicer

Happened to be in Fred Meyer with Eden looking for a spaceheater for her when I ran across the aisle of kitchen appliances. Cheese slicer quickly came to mind. My trip back home in Michigan reminded me of how much I loved these things. And now was the time to capitalize.

We got back to my place where I proclaimed my victory to the roommates, upon which one of them quickly opened the kitchen drawer and pulled out her own cheese slicer. I was unaware we already had a cheese slicer.

Sooo I kept the cheese slicer because it was from Good Grips which is always a good choice. And I must say, this little piece of metal and rubber has doubled my lunch satisfaction. Amazing how cheese sliced a little thinner makes all the difference.

Usually I would say this is stupid, why am I getting so excited about thinner cheese? Stupid to get excited about little things. Stupid to get excited. Better to get excited about the big stuff. The big trips. The weekends. The holidays.

Thing is the big stuff comes and goes and almost never is quite what we wanted it to be. Either too short or thinking about how great it is so much and how much it will suck when it's over that it gets over way too quickly.

Thus my proposal. Get lost in the sweet glory of a cheese slicer. Allow for celebration. Stupid, glorious celebration. Celebration that doesn't need to wait for the grand vacation getaway. So great getting excited about the small things. It's like singing in the shower, like dancing in the kitchen, like letting out a little shout that you made the street light just in time when you thought there's no chance.

And what's even better? Someone to enjoy you in the midst of your glorious over-excitement. Who loves it and joins you well in the midst. The adverse is obvious: someone telling you to stay in line, ship up, stop acting like a fool, why the hell are you getting so excited about a cheese slicer. And I would like to tell those voices that it is sad that your envy carries itself so far as to want to ruin someone else's day because yours is so boring.

Knowing very well how boring I can make the day to day, I call myself to repent to the sweet glory of slicing cheese. I invite you to join.

Wolves

"They tumble and fight, and they're beautiful
On the hilltops at night, they are beautiful
Blazing with light, is the whitest and the tallest and the biggest one
She's muscled and fine
When she runs"

Wolves are in his house, in his mind. Haunting. Hovering. Invading. Disrupting.

And then the most haunting statement yet. He describes them. Beautiful. These creatures, these creatures that haunt, they are so beautiful.

Maddening. And thus is beauty. Beauty is maddening. Scandalous. Seductive. As if it gets away with too much. That too much haunts us. Beauty haunts.

Even the way you say the word, the letters that comprise it, the first three from the beginning of the alphabet, the last three from the end. As if the letters are describing the range of life beauty is able to hold. Beauty is good and it is bad. It does not allow for a split, instead holding a complexity and spectrum of experience that will never be defined in simple terms.

We want to split, casting beauty in an over-sexed, denigrating, violent objectification of women, or over-spiritualizing beauty that is naive and out of touch with the real world, a world without real desire, pain, heartache.

Beauty is not perfection. Perfection is fragmented. Beauty is wholeness. Beauty is the mysterious winding of flaw. And one who can bear their own flaw is a beautiful person. These beautiful people are so wonderful to be around.

Beauty is dark and light. One needs the other to create, and beauty the medium in which they dance, the canvas in which one dares allow their mixing. No wonder any real creation involves risk.

These wolves. They are terrible. And they are amazing. He fears them and cannot keep his eyes off them. Thus is beauty. Thus is life.