Candle Wax

When I was a kid, I loved the idea of fire, but my parents would never let me have anything to do with it. This is probably like most children. You want to play with what is forbidden to you. The exception was when there was a birthday, and then sometimes I would get to light some candles on someone's birthday cake. And of course, when it was my own birthday, I would get to blow them out. This was my first introduction to being able to handle a form of fire.

Candle wax is wonderful, until you realize that when it melts, it is almost as hot as the fire itself. When I was a child, at Christmas Eve Service they would give us little candles which would be lit at the end of the service, as we passed the light of Christ throughout the congregation. The candles had little paper holders around the bottom, which in theory would catch the wax, but they never would quite do the trick. We would be holding the Light of Christ, but the byproduct of the light of the baby Jesus would be dripping down onto our hands and burning us. It was an exercise in irony.

It was hot as Hell.

I hadn't thought about what candle wax would do to other objects, either, but once, blowing out the candles on my mother's dinner table, I realized (all too late) that I should have used the little bell-shaped candle snuffer, because the liquid, red wax from the candles blew onto her elegant cream-colored best table cloth, and the stains never came out. We never had much money, and we couldn't afford to replace the tablecloth. The look in my mother's eyes when she looked at that stain hurt me worse than hot wax could ever have done.

You can't have light without heat. And you can't have candle light without candle wax.

The sucker's hot.

The Telecommuning Soul

It is a typical midsummer evening in Montgomery County. The sun has gone down on another hot, humid, and hazy day; yet in the dusk the temperature has started to go down, and the grass is a lush green, thanks to the rain we have gotten lately.

My pup Angel and I enter the pathway, a shaded tunnel on the side of our house, and turn right at the corner of our fence, emerging into the common area. A couple of deer lift their white tails and bolt into the woods. Fireflies rise from the grass like a multitude of the glowing, fervid souls of the redeemed, resurrected in the rapture at the sound of the final trumpet.

This is the physical world, and I love it. Its extreme temperatures become difficult for me to live with in midsummer and the bitter winter, but I try not to complain. In all too short a span of time the lush greens will fade, the air will turn crisp, and then freeze. Those who complain now about the heat will soon complain about the cold.

But there is another world laid over the physical part of our existence – another part of the person who is Kathy Long. Theories of our being describe humans as a dichotomy or a trichotomy, depending on what religious or philosophical view you espouse. If you believe in an afterlife, when this physical body ceases to function, the light that is Kathy Long will go dark in this world, and we hope that it will flicker into existence in another, better, world. That light is usually referred to as my soul or my spirit. (Or both.)

 

Humans are developing in yet another way. With the advent of the Internet, and in particular the Social Web, we have integrated another component into our being.

I first became aware of this phenomenon in the mid-80s, when I became involved with a few online communities. Each of these was fairly isolated from the others, not yet linked together by the "Internet". Depending upon my activities in a given community, I became known as an entity that was separate from (but somewhat the same as) the real-life Kathy Long.

In the community where I was the most active, I took the persona of "ByteSize", and quickly realized that I could present myself however I saw fit. ByteSize may or may not have been very much like Kathy Long, depending on how much of myself I wanted to reveal. The important idea was that in this digital incarnation, people didn't first see a thirty-something stay-at-home mother of two who ran her own business from home. Rather, I was known online for my ideas, and my ability to express them. Therein lay a great deal of personal liberation.

A friend of mine in this group referred to himself as "a telecommuning soul", and even now this label appeals to me. I still find that some of my deepest and most enduring relationships are carried on via the Social Web and the Blogosphere.

And this was prior to Facebook. Prior to the Internet unifying these various "online services" and enabling them to talk to each other. Forgive me if this sounds "too cool for school" but I was involved in online communities long before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye.

A man by the name of Nicolas Carr has recently written a book entitled "The Shallows", whose main premise is that the Internet is re-wiring our brain circuits. The main gist of his argument is that our activity on the Internet is damaging our minds.

There are others who feel that there is only a change in the way our mental circuits process information, as the brain constantly changes and adapts to our every experience. And this change isn't a bad thing. One of these is Tom Stafford, a lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. To the question "Does the Internet change your brain?", he responds that everything we do changes our brains, including making a cup of tea, and it's not anything to worry about.

So put your mind at ease.

Our lives have a new dimension. We exist in the physical world; the world of the soul; and now also the world of bits and bytes. And maybe the Kathy Long you see on the Social Web or the Blogosphere is a better representation of her true self, as thoughts and feelings fly free of the strictures of the physical world.

When I Go Home

Grandma Smith. Grandma Chamness. Aunt Katie and Uncle Lloyd. Uncle Lyle. Daddy.

These are the people whose spirits are always somewhere in the back of my consciousness. They are the ones who loved me unconditionally, and had hopes for me. I, and the children born to the family in my generation were at one time The Hope of the Future. In the days approaching a trip home, their spirits solidify in my mind and memories, and become more real. As I near Home, they are a welcoming committee, watching me cross the threshold into southern Illinois. And when I am Home, I miss them more than ever, because when I arrive, their places are empty.

Now there is Mom, and a couple of cousins. We often remember the others and miss them together. I am who I am, because they helped me start my life. And I hope that I can live it in a way that would have made them proud.

Sometimes I have a sense of them as the "cloud of witnesses" - that they see me from afar. And I hope they are proud of the woman I have become.

I'm always shocked at the way things have changed, as in my mind I remember the Zeigler/Carbondale/whatever of yesterday.

I'm always pleasantly surprised by the persisting love and bonds that still exist between myself and those I love.

I feel sorry for people who have never had a real "home" that they can come back to.

A Dyslexic Devotional

Q: Did you hear the one about the dyslexic insomniac agnostic?
A: He used to stay up all night, wondering if there was a Dog.

Bear with me, I actually am going somewhere with this thought. And the thought is Unconditional Love. The only two places I have found it in this life are from God, and from my dog.

I will talk about my dog first. I have heard people say they wish they were as perfect as their dog thinks they are. Sometimes I fall short of perfection, but my dog still wants to be with me, and looks at me with adoring eyes. I may yell at her, or discipline her, but she forgives me every time. Every time I walk through the door, I am greeted with enthusiastic, unreserved love. It is a Wonderful Thing.

I certainly don't want to trivialize the love of God by comparing it to the love of Dog, but can only say that there are many people in the world who will never know true unconditional love. My dog is not aware of my imperfections, but God is; yet he readily forgives us and loves us unconditionally.

That leaves the rest of us who are neither Divine nor Canine. We have a hard time giving OR receiving unconditional love.

We can't give unconditional love, because of our expectations. Something within us wants payment for our love... or at least a quid pro quo. We have an instinctive feeling that THERE IS A PRICE TO BE PAID FOR LOVE. We do something wonderful for someone, and they forget to tell us thanks, they don't do us a favor in return, or they generally take us for granted. Our feelings are hurt.

Or maybe the other person did something that made us angry with them, and we aren't big enough to forgive them and love them. There is a price to be paid for love. Like the statue of Justice, we hold a balancing scale in our hand, and the weights on either side are always unequal. For we humans, loving unconditionally is an impossibility.

We sometimes can't receive unconditional love, either. It is too big, and implies a future commitment on our part. Our cramped and shriveled little souls can't unclench enough to receive it. We know the sinful beings we are, and we know that we don't deserve it.

The good news is that God's unconditional love is free. There is a price to be paid for it, but it has already been paid. All we need to do is stretch out our hearts and our hands and receive it.