Isaiah 6:12 JB There will be a great emptiness
in the country....
Sap runs from stumps cut clean, acres of decades stilled in the silence of trees’ rings. Gone are the deer at dawn, the fireflies at last light, the unruly kudzu, the red wasp. These things, we confess, still exist–like a watch with a second hand or the idea of a beginning and an end– but to us have grown meaningless. Where we once saw a forest of shagbark hickory, white cedar, trout lilies, Virginia creeper, and a creek named Parker's Branch, we now see 95 acres for sale or lease. Enormous black and white boxes of buildings are raised up in their place, vast containers of empty space waiting to be filled by anyone with anything. The names never matter. Do we build what we’ve become, I wonder, or do we become what we build? Either way, echoes of the land before still haunt this new temperature-controlled space–the way the sound of wild sea waves still roar in the hollow shell that sits on my desk in its appointed place.