Purpose

Off to carry mail for the United States Post Office again today. I don't think I've mentioned this yet but I'm a substitute rural mail carrier. Which means I work an average of one day a year carrying mail. Given our lifestyle that's about enough for me.

Planted thirty-five red pine and an apple tree over the weekend. It always feels good to plant a few trees in the spring. Now the work begins trying to keep them alive through the summer dry spells.

Yesterday I got the chance to sit down and read close to 50 pages in All of the Above. I bookmarked a page so I could write down a quote(I usually do this but never write down the quote. Then I end up pulling books off the shelf looking for the quote that never got written down.)that I think would have went well with yesterday's post.

"It's the last thing he would have expected, but there it was. For the first time in a long time, Cole felt fully alive, as if the state trooper had given him a blessing instead of a fright. He could still feel the Earth moving majestically beneath him. And he could imagine himself standing straight and true on this slowly-spinning ground, as if, finally, finally, he belonged here. There were huge forces at work all around him: spinning underneath, flitting overhead, stirring deep inside. There was some vast story being enacted in the universe. He understood very little of it and he was scared as hell. But he was also needed. He was involved. He had a role. His actions now mattered in a way they never had before. Like a pupal moth beginning to form it's wings, Cole could feel the first hints of some new purpose he might serve in the wider world, some grander meaning he might discover beyond the caretaking of his family. Rather than finding the right script to follow before he could live his life, Cole now found himself thrust onstage with no script at all."--Timothy Scott Bennett, Pg.140, All of the Above

Although I wasn't married after I had read Ishmael, most of the paragraph describes how I felt. There really was no script to follow, and that felt odd but good. It still does.