Straight Lines Are For Carpenters

I mentioned that I walked my first labyrinth over the weekend. The circuitous pathway brought it home to me that I had always thought my life should proceed upon a straight path. And perhaps now, even in recovery (dirty little secret coming up) or especially in recovery it is still my expectation that I can control my orderly Carol path.

I offer some more Annie Dillard as an antidote to my rigid thinking . . . she comments on the countless forms of life in nature . . .

Why so many forms? Why not just that one hydrogen atom? The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn't , particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl--but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.