JOY ALONG THE WAY: STAYING AFLOAT, SO TO SPEAK

There are these words in E.B. White's 1971 acceptance speech for the National Medal of Literature: " ... Today with so much of life damaged and endangered ... dispiriting or joyless ... despair is no good ... only hope and faith can keep us afloat. ..."

These words are still applicable today. Maybe even more so. I don't like to dwell on the words, damaged, endangered, dispiriting, joyless, unless in the dwelling on them I can think of some way to help "keep us afloat" as White would say.

I have that hope and faith, for the One who made the incredible structure of the earth, and all that's in it surely did not make it as a plaything to cast aside when He tired of it.

White suggests the role of the writer is to help sustain the spirit, fight with words the damaged, endangered, dispiriting and joyless things. And we have great writers who have done this and still do, to-wit: "Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindnesses and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart and secure comfort," written by Sir Humphry Davy. But not all people read.

We have our great orators who do the same thing, to-wit: "Fortify yourself with contentment, for this is an impregnable fortress," said by Epictetus. But not everyone listens.

It seems to me the "burden" of lifting the spirits, sustaining hope, keeping the faith falls upon those I call the "ordinary people." If for nothing else, the sheer number of them.

If a nearly deaf person says, "Although I can't hear much except the music, I go to church to show whose side I'm on," that demonstrates keeping the faith.

A friend, writing to me from a big city, tells of a sunflower that came up in the crack of a much traveled sidewalk. Someone, in the dark of night, erected a little slated protective box around the bottom of the lonely flower. That lifts the spirit.

If joyous, lilting laughter has been relegated to the young children, listen to them. They are the ones who have most recently come from the spirited and joyful realm and the blum is still on them. They are sustainers of hope, unaware.

It was just an "ordinary" person who, on a lazy summer day, sitting beside me, sipping a cool drink, who suddenly turned her attention from the flowers, birds and a lonely, flitting, yellow swallowtail, to say, shyly, "You know future hope is a wonderful thing, lying warmly on the backroads of my minds, so to speak, but it is the present reality I live with." She looked again at the blue sky decorated with sleeping cloud sheep, the newly mown grass that faintly perfumed the air we breathed, the myriad of blooming black-eyed Susans.

Did I say, facetiously, "Oh, you ended your sentence with a preposition." No. I, too, mentally reveled in the reality of the present, resting my mind, so to speak, on one of the fleecy cloud sheep. Just two ordinary people loosely weaving a net through which dispirited and joyless things could slip as into a black hole while we remained afloat, so to speak.

REJOICE!

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime columnist for the Southeast Missourian.