human longing tagged posts

A Bible, abandoned, tattered, weed-strewn.

Found by Houston-area artist and photographer Patrick Feller as he climbed along a bank to get pictures of an old railroad bridge crossing Interstate 45.

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He had taken a different route when returning up the bank, through an overgrown area with thick vegetation and debris that suggested to him previous occupation by “those who had found some sort of shelter in the shade of this thicket.”

The Bible was open, stiffly, to Joshua 18, a brief chapter in the Old Testament describing the division of land to seven tribes of Israel which had at that time not received their allotment.

Joshua sent surveyors out to document the land, then cast lots to distribute each section, every tribe thus getting its due of God’s bounty.

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Someone had presumably been reading of this in the shade of a bridge, some 7,000 miles from where the events described in the book had ta...

Sometimes I think life effectively ends the morning you wake up and you’re no longer able to look forward to something. It can be just about anything: your cup of coffee, the gaze to your garden in the first rays of the sun, a favorite show or sports event on television, the opening of a newspaper or log-on to email, the dive back into the book you fell asleep with the night before, the walk with the dog or meetup with a friend or family member at lunch.

Anticipation is everything, it seems—the pull forward to something that awaits, the zest and expectancy with which we tell ourselves in the quiet of our heart: “Oh, this will be good!” (To which we often append the colloquial expression we kindly share with those whose presence we anticipate: “Can’t wait!”)

Yet anticipation carries within it the seed of its own problem: Will the reality measure up? Will the actual conversation or lunch or bal...