That'll Do

As I am typing this, it is 28 Degrees outside, and the wind is blowing 22 MPH. If you factor for wind chill, it is 14 Degrees outside. That means that it is 20 Degrees warmer than it was this same time last week. I celebrate the small victories.

I usually post new stuff of Sundays, because that is when I have the time. Today I felt like adding something because it has been on my mind. Working with the public I hear: "Is it cold/windy enough for ya?" "Don't like the weather wait ten minutes, it'll change" "It's always windy in Wyoming." I know that this is just people being friendly and making conversation, and on an individual basis, I appreciate it. When you've heard it all day long, eventually you start to analyze it. Not the people saying it, (that is for a different day) but what they are saying.

I can spot a someone foreign to Wyoming pretty easily these days. Half of the time, I don't even need to hear them talk. It's not so much that people not from here stick out; it's that people who are from here or have chosen to be from here have a way about them. It's something you can really understand on a night like this. People who have made this their home can go about their business in this weather untroubled by it. The face right into it and do what they set out to do. There is a set to their shoulders that neither leans into the wind, nor cowers away from it.

This fascinates me, and it is the greatest thing living here has taught me. You can still go about your life with the hounds of hell nipping at your heels. Put on some decent foul weather gear, and you can do it happily. You'll do, and your persistence will be rewarded with heartbreakingly beautiful summer days.

Don't Take It Too Seriously...

For those of you who are unfamiliar with my family, this is my dad, Larry Pritchard. The Padre. This is one of my favorite pictures of him. He has no idea I took it. It's not my best work, it's not particularly beautiful. What I love about it is, that I know that look. There is a lot going beneath the surface here. He is about to say something that is going to make us all crack up. He doesn't usually have a lot to say, but when he does it's worth hearing.

I could go on and on about life lessons my parents have taught me; never camp in a wash, never buy a horse before you ride it, don't do business with anyone you wouldn't shake hands with, etc. None of that will mean to you what it means to me. What I can tell you is this, we laugh our butts off. We find humor in almost everything, and dad is usually the ring leader. Mom is like a savant with one liners, Seth is on the bleeding edge of left field, I have a gift for understatement, and Raym is all about physical comedy.

A recent trip to Sam's Club included Padre and Raym doing Captain and Tennile on an electric keyboard, Seth spear tackling me into a mattress display, and mom saying things like "I don't want one with jiggly balls, I just want a regular one." Obviously, we are not welcome back to that particular Sam's Club, but whatever. We had a good time. And that's the beauty of things.

Growing up, I just remember one crazy fun adventure after another. All the crappy stuff always seemed to be happening in the fuzzy peripheral part of things. Times were tough when I was little, and we moved a lot. It never seemed like a burden then, and it still doesn't. I think it's because we never let it get to us. I know times are tough for a lot of people now, and all signs point to them getting tougher. We'll get through it like we always have with hard work and a healthy sense of humor. So, be good to each other and always remember that fake dog poop is funny.

"This is What I Must Fight For, And What I Must Fight Against"

I'm going to share what I believe is one of the greatest things ever written. It's out of my favorite book East of Eden, by George Steinbeck (Chapter 13, Section 1). I know some of you aren't into literature, and that's okay. I think you'll still appreciate it.

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then--the glory--so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.

I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is a great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.

At such a time is seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?

Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.

And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this is what I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost."

When I am frustrated and mad at everything I read this, and it helps me sort things out. It helped me to define something that I always believed, but was not able to put into words. The picture used this week is from my trip to the Oregon Coast. I believe it was taken somewhere north of Rockaway Beach.