Let Flow the River of Life

So, I found a four year old draft of a post that I was working on but never got around to actually publishing. I've set off the old portion of the post, and taken the liberty of, finally, finishing my thought.

Yeah, it's been a crazy long time since I've posted. I'd give you excuses, but I don't have to, because it's my website. Plus the fact that you probably don't exist, because nobody reads this thing. I mean, it's not like I haven't had any deep thoughts since this past spring; I just haven't had a chance to glue myself to this page for a few minutes.

Oh, I'm such a liar. I have had chances. I just didn't take them. Well, I guess I'd better bring the blog up to speed, anyway. Let's see, I worked all summer, started college classes with an 18 hour courseload, quit my job because I was going to suffocate being out of the house and being away from my wife and friends all the time, I just finished a quadruple-decker quesadilla with mushrooms (by the way, yes, it is after midnight), and I'm working on a pitcher of Kool-Aid by myself because Kimberly doesn't like cherry. Go figure.

Done and done. Now for the deep philosophical stuff.

Life is a river. I know, you're sick of hearing similes about life. Life is beautiful. Life is good. Life is . And at points, one or all of those might be true. But life is always a river. Why?

For one thing, rivers are laughably simple and unnervingly complex in the same stroke. If you think about it, all a river really is is a massive collection of water molecules exerted upon by the gravitational force to flow through topographically depressed areas until they reach an open body of water, where they circulate until evaporation sucks them into the atmosphere and into the remainder of the water cycle. If you look at a river from high above, it just looks like a dark squiggly line juxtaposed against the green and brown streaks of dry land.

If you jump into the river, though, you'll find that it is much more complex than that. First, it is teeming with life. From algal growth to river reeds, bass fingerlings to carp, catfish to water bugs, turtles to the occasional otter and everything in-between, an entire ecosystem hides in that dark squiggle.

Life is the same way. Technically, humans are composed of about twenty different elements ranging from arsenic to zinc that, in the quantity present in an average human body, would cost no more than five dollars. Indeed, in the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, human shaped shadows were found on sidewalk pavement; it was later found that when the bomb hit, the blast wave was so incredibly hot that it flashboiled people walking down the sidewalk, leaving only carbon dust behind.

The trouble (?) is, we're specialized. The base elements composing our bodies can be had for a five spot - but in their structured and specialized forms, the aggregate parts of the human body are worth over forty-five million dollars. It's one thing to know that a lack of serotonin in the brain can lead to episodes of anger - it's quite another to feel that magmatic, seething undercurrent of rage when it burns in our chests. So how do we reconcile the two? How do we acknowledge the presence of serotonin without denying love? How do we admit that the river of life is a dark squiggle while not neglecting that life is so much more than that?

We obviously need a common denominator.

After four years, I think that common denominator is koinonia - fellowship. Koinonia is the Greek word that is well-translated as "communion by intimate participation." The communion that only comes by sharing things in common with people whom you've developed a shared story with. The trick to turning the river of life from a massive collection of molecules to a living ribbon of sapphire is writing that shared story.