A coworker came to Plainfield to walk the loop with me in search of locations for a video shoot we have in the works. While we walked I collected rocks, as I always do, and I explained to him my thoughts on the virtues of hauling stones by hand. He described it as nearly Sisyphean. I’d imagine that has more to do with the moving stones up a hill bit than the useless and endlessly repetitive and torturous nature of it, which is pretty far from my truth. Every rock is different and every haul up the slippery side of the hill is uniquely challenging. That makes it valuable as an exercise both physically and spiritually.

Do you think Sisyphus appreciated days when the landscape of his hill was made unique or different? Did he care when storms transformed the slope, taking down hills or making it too slippery to make much progress?

I have to imagine he cared and even appreciated those differences. 

 

Abby made a comment that I’ve already used this carousel of Archie before in a different post. I have not. This is perhaps the fifth or sixth such series of pictures I’ve taken and composed on this blog. 

I walk with Archie.

I call his name.

 I take pictures as he approaches me.

 I tell him he’s a good boy.

GK Chesterton posited at some point in Orthodoxy that perhaps the sun rising in the east, the flower blooming, the dog approaching the master are the same each time not because they are the mindless unspooling mechanical watchworks of a divine creator, but because that same divine creator wills them into existence each day anew with a childlike wonder. The way a child asks a parent to jump, or throw a ball, or sing a song, or read a story, again and again and again. God has not lost the childlike love of simple things done again.