Life goes On

I didn’t intend to take a break from writing, didn’t even know there was such a thing for me, but I have more or less done so. I haven’t touched the novella I started some months ago.

In recent weeks I have read a couple of good fiction books and delighted in streaming classic black and white films free from YouTube, most of them made far before my birth. While watching, I rediscovered my delight and relaxation in crocheting. The movies and crocheting give a space away from the current world that I find increasingly bizarre and often tragic. When I look at it, the same can be said of 1970s, when I initially took up the craft of crochet. This was the height of the Vietnam era, and crochet was popular in psychedelic colored yarn.

To refresh my memory, I went to the 1970s timeline in Britannica online. The first paragraph begins with, “The decade after the “Swinging Sixties” was marked by unrest and upheaval,” and cites The Vietnam War, the Fall of Saigon, President Nixon having to resign because of the Watergate Scandal (and we find out today all kinds of new stuff about that smoke and mirrors), Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and on and on, a lot of the same names we hear today, just the positions change.

A quote by iconic poet Robert Frost springs to mind: “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.” The quote in it’s entirety is solid truth for the ages.

“In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on. In all the confusions of today, with all our troubles . . . with politicians and people slinging the word fear around, all of us become discouraged . . . tempted to say this is the end, the finish. But life — it goes on. It always has. It always will. Don’t forget that.

— Robert Frost, poet, teacher, writer

Frost made this statement at the celebration of his eightieth birthday. He had learned from a lifetime of facing tragedy and triumph, mistakes that cost him a farm, success as America’s Poet, two world wars, and the loss of a child and a wife, and still writing and living on.

Don’t forget that Life goes on. As is written in John 1: 4-5: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” The darker the dark becomes, the brighter the light shines. The light is getting brighter everywhere, just look and you’ll see it.

Let your light shine, dear friends.

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