Book 3: Eclipse 3

Yes, of course there was a method… To his madness? To his way… You let the day come to you. You reach from your deep intentions each morning starting slow, you follow those sources of flow surely doing your best along the way. You take the day in, you give the day, those around you, the gifts you have to offer… You read and write and play and pray and engage with friends and family…

The various and profound limitations you face remain and continue and… Or need we say "but" now… It's acknowledged, named. It makes all the difference in the world and sometimes it doesn't.

As for sources of what is real… Messages to inform, to help frame reality, the universe… It's purposes and trajectories… Where do you look?

As Karl Barth suggested: the Bible and the newspaper are present indeed and heard and valued together as whatever God might be trying to say to you now… Access to the world… What news media calls "the latest"… This is what he wants and it shouldn't be too much to ask... he generally thinks to himself…

Toast is meant to be eaten warm so the butter can melt but not fast enough to disappear before one is through with a piece, and news was transpiring instantly and always and so much was happening and at stake and he wanted to see and hear and witness as much as he possibly could…

He would be over there fighting already if he could… There was fight in him, fierceness and far too often nowhere to go with it.

He drank his coffee and munched his toast and stared at the screen.

Why do I do it? He asks himself again and again.

Witness: APARTMENT BUILDING BOMBED

On the screen he watches a video of two firemen helping an elderly woman out of a burning building. She is held together by old sweaters and a house coat, her feet are bare and the fireman carefully moves one of them, the fire scorched gloves squeezing the swells of her left ankle, so as not to allow it to get caught up in the cold steel foothold of the latter, as they make their way down together with much struggle. Painfully.

She is someone's chubby old grandmother, she and her grandson escaped the burning building after he woke them both and was able to lead them out onto the balcony where they had to climb over the railings of several apartments and make their way around the building to be offered a way down.

Things are getting worse. More talks break down and the bombardment of cities to the south and west increases, some of it dangerously close to the Polish border.

Anthony made chicken noodle soup and way too much of it. It started a day after the war began, he wanted to lift spirits, boost morale around the restaurant with regulars so he made his grandmother's chicken noodle soup and sold it for half-price. Here the third week now there were fewer takers and he was trying to get rid of it so the man sat eating it for free at his station by the window where he celebrated a pretty good day with Uber driving.

The sketchpad was full of workups of guys in trenches with machine guns. Old plastic figures of guys laying on their stomachs, shouldering bazookas or on one knee hurling mortars would captivate him for hours as a boy. 

Show me one little kid who doesn't play at least for a little with that odd and ominous power we have figured out for ourselves: Blowing things up.

Or what about that first pocketknife or BB gun?

As I watched my older brother shoot his first targets in the backyard when he was 13 and I was 12, I saw a boy transformed into a man right before my eyes… Pifft, pifft, pifft, Ping!

As I gazed at the screen watching the poor woman wobbling at the transfer near the waiting wheelchair.… I got so angry I wanted to spit, to throw a knife, a fist or throw something into flames – I sketched a man throwing a bottle of whiskey at the wall and watching it explode.

He talks about himself as a writer and as a military man in his head back at the apartment with scotch. He sketches talking to Zoe in his head. He prays for peace, alas it's violent madness instead.