Goals

One of my goals in creating this blog was to post some entry each day, some musing related to one of the purposes listed in the blog's description just below the banner. But, on some days it is difficult for a writer, especially an amateur (in its true and original meaning from the Latin, a lover or devotee, one who does what they do simply because they love doing it) as myself to do so. Nonetheless, I've been advised to write a page each day and see where those pages might take me.

I suppose today is one of those difficult days where one does not know which words may come from the pen or its modern-day cousin, the keyboard. The only significant role January 5th has ever had in my life is that it was the birthday of my great-grandmother, on my maternal grandmother's side, one Rachel Scott Brawner Lewis, born in 1895, a person I only vaguely remember, but do indeed remember something. She died in March, 1967 when I was six years old. It may have been Easter weekend. I remember hearing my mother making a noise which I took to be laughter, but I later found out was not, as she was in fact sobbing, laying on the lower bunk of the bunk bed set my brother and I shared in our bedroom as kids. My great-grandmother's brother-in-law, my late uncle Noble Hedger, had called her from Frankfort with the news of Rachel's death. It is my earliest recollection of any familiarity with death - and funerals. Rachel's services were held at the Rogers Funeral Home in Frankfort, on the south or right hand side of Second Street, just as you descend the hill from Louisville and opposite the Second Street School. Many years after Rachel passed, another of her brothers-in-law, Revel Vaughn Lewis, held some ownership in that business, although I am unfamiliar as to what that ownership was. Uncle Revel has also passed on, his interment being in the plot of his wife's family, the late Ruth Sacre Lewis, somewhere in the Frankfort Cemetery, overlooking town from the east, nearly opposite from the Rogers Funeral Home location at the west.

Where we are in life, not only in our professional lives, or our personal lives, but also physically in where we are geographically, helps to shape our outlooks as we move through this process known as life. I have written elsewhere that the one sure thing about life is that living it forces one to actually live. Even should one choose to sit out, to stand by, passively allowing those around you to make decisions, determine courses, and live for you, that in itself is a conscious way of living out a life. Making that decision to be passive is actively determining your course.

Knowing that ultimately we all must "shuffle off this mortal coil" should be reason enough to force participation. Knowing there is an end to the thread at which we will eventually arrive, and seeing how thin such a thread truly is, makes those geographic places we find ourselves, whether at the foot of Louisville Hill on Second Street in Frankfort, or up on top of town overlooking the river and the town below, like Merlin up on a hillside overlooking King Uther as he fights the battle below, utlimately handing off his sword to that of his alleged son Arthur, thereby showing him as heir and successor, we all have roles to play, and it is important we all play, however large or small that role might be.

All roles are important. Another way of saying that is that all lives are important. None of us are truly any more important that any other one of us. In my life I've had the opportunity to meet people in my vocation and avocation who are deemed important by society. And while each of them may have some role of some importance in some way to some of us, the fact we are all mortal allows that whatever importance they may have is also mortal. But there is always the next day. In the very beginning of the Bible, in the very beginning of the Book of Genesis, is a well-known story of creation. Each part closes with the words "Evening came and morning followed." As such, creation continues. As I look out my window, north toward downtown Louisville and the Ohio River, the sun has set over the hills in Floyd County, Indiana, over there beyond the Right Bank of the Ohio River. Evening, as promised, has come. I am hopeful and confident that morning, as promised, will follow on January 6th.