Yesterday, driving home from a walk, I saw Jeremy, my mail carrier, disappearing down the road into the dark of the early evening, the stripes on his pant legs and jacket sleeves shining in my headlights. At first I thought he was working overtime, but these days four o’clock seems like late evening, and he was just finishing his regular route.
Which he does faithfully day after day, summer heat, winter cold, rain and snow notwithstanding, even on those days I’m glad to be able to stay indoors, clomping up the stairs to the door to pick up bill payments and ballots and drop off ads, notices, packages, cards, and letters.
I’m grateful, of course, for his service, and impressed by what he does, but, thinking more broadly, I’m grateful for and impressed by the postal service here in the U.S. and those all around the world. For, if I want to chat with or confide in anyone in the world who has an address, all I have to do is put my words on a piece of paper, slip it in an envelope, affix a stamp, and put it out for someone like Jeremy to pick up and deliver with no fanfare to someone who’s no more special than myself, the exact same letter, intact, having traveled swiftly and accurately across the world.
Between the two mailboxes, what a complicated process: the all night facilities, the trucks and planes, the heavy bags hefted, the collectings and sortings. When I think on this, that it works, that it works as easily and reliably as it does, and worldwide, I’m amazed and awed. This system has the complexity and granularity of the wildest conspiracy theories, but, this is crucial, it’s not secret and it’s to serve the public good.
The way transcendent freshness is impressive is similar.
Freshness is right now inviting and invigorating encounters between people of all backgrounds, all over the world, all the time, and has been doing so all through the ages, and will continue to do so while the world endures.
We experience encounters as very immediate, very local, very personal, a you and a me, just now and right here, as concrete as the sealed or torn open envelope, and freshness does suffuse those experiences. But freshness is also like the whole postal system, immense in scope (breadth, depth and reach) and scale (order of magnitude), persistent, incessant, indefatigable.
Some things are impressive as a concrete whole, inspiring awe and humility: an imposing mountain, a vast panoramic expanse, a grand building, a massive dam, a cavernous interior space, an intricate operation like the workings of a watch. The achievements of creativity and diligence evident in great books, pieces of music, works of art are also impressive. These often make a pretty immediate impact, at first glance, or in a circuit, or by the last page, but basically all one piece, all in one place. With unreflective familiarity, over time the impact of even the most impressive can wane.
Certain persons are impressive, especially if they represent the apex of a hierarchy of power. If we need help or something done, we want something or someone of intrinsic authority on our side, massive enough, strong enough, smart enough to quickly and decisively effect change on our behalf.
Even fictions can be impressive: the numinous ghost in the story, or the intellectual system worked out in a combination of all-encompassing vision and exquisitely precise detail.
Freshness, however, is not intimidating (in the sense of filling the field of view), not demanding (in the sense of strictly enforced), not useful (in the sense of getting things to work out), and so not impressive in the way some other things are. Indeed, sometimes freshness can be occluded by fatigue or fear.
But it is impressive, however, in the way that what we call Nature is: that dense web of things physical, chemical and biological mutually interacting all at the same time. We typically notice only small parts of what’s going on at any moment unless we step back and follow the connections outwardly to a sense, an epiphany, of something so expansive, so rich, so overwhelmingly wonderful in its sheer functioning existence that something inside us bows in silent reverence.
The same day I noticed Jeremy, I came across the grave marker of Lysander Spooner, a nineteenth century man hailing from Athol in midstate Massachusetts. Among his achievements was setting up and running an alternative postal system to break the monopoly and reduce prices, and today there are many more such. Nowadays, messages of all kinds travel from mind to mind, and heart to heart, more quickly and by more channels and over an infrastructure more complex, more global, than ever before, a network so densely interwoven and so charged with energy, we can visualize it as a mantle of light covering the globe.
So it is with freshness. All the time, freshness is active in the midst of encounters all over the planet, one by one, here, there, each leading on to another, circling back, branching out…the livingnesses of multitudes of us engaged in encountering are activated, full of verve, more and more hospitable, friendly, and exploratory as a result…and these encounters, together with those of all the yesterdays, and all the tomorrows, are bringing into being, are the very constituents of, something numinous, the final shape yet to be determined, but surely, like freshness itself, very impressive.