by Joe McKenzie
Fall: What if we counted our blessings each time we saw a leaf flutter from a tree? Or at least said a prayer of thanks. Imagine the fun or extended meditation you would have raking a whole yard. What great exercise! It’s not the same with a leaf blower. Unless you blow the leaves/prayers/blessings into a large, fluffy, earth-scented pile. Then, invite young full-of-life kids to jump joyously into your accumulated blessings as a reminder that with life comes seasons of change. All of these colorful, multi-shaped leaves can compost your blessings into enriching our earth.
Goodness: Found it! If you are like many and in a constant search for goodness in this world, in your city, work or life, well, I’ve found it - real essential goodness. You may be subconsciously open to experiencing good stuff. You would know it when you saw, felt or heard it. We are all too aware of the badness on the planet. But, on a box of cereal at Aldi’s, I found the label of Essential Goodness. It didn’t have any extraneous strands of almost good, or modified nice or the icky ultra processed great. Just the essentials. I added cold Braum’s A2 milk. Hope the reduced fat milk didn’t dilute the effect. Every bite of breakfast was essential and crunchily good. Just knowing we had essential goodness to start the day gave me a boost. Or was that just too easy?
Potato Man: This is a sculpture tour piece standing cold in the parking lot behind Prairieland Market. The man looks old. He looks poor as he tries to sell his hard earned bucket of potatoes. The artist, Susan Geissler, sculpted a weathered face that is worth trying to understand, like every life-worn human face we meet. This potato man has stories. Some involve potatoes and his people from Ireland or North Central Kansas. A recent multi-generational collaboration of two Salina churches produced chili delivered to 530 people living in small motels and other shelters. That’s a lot of hungry life-worn people in our town. This public art is a good reminder that on one of these cold nights, it might be nourishing to cook warm potato soup and find a way to share it.
Empty Nets: Is this a typo? Did I mean to write empty nest? Is it hockey season already and desperate teams are pulling the goalie and leaving an empty net? I notice so many unused basketball goals in driveways with lonely, quiet nets. There are action-filled driveways in Salina, but once the nest is empty the nets can go empty as well. What if there was an easy way to recycle empty nets and put them into Salina driveways and alleys where a new generation can pretend to be Caitlin Clark? Or Lebron James?
News: Remember when your daily news arrived air-born and pre-dawn wrapped tightly in a rubber banded throwable rocket that often flew end over end toward your home or landscape? Imagine that moment of flight for your paper. Freeze that paper mid-flight in your memory. There it was. Local news up in the air and headed your way. As autumn reminds us, things change. That was a moment in time. News at your doorstep. Every morning. It was a complex process to produce a daily newspaper overnight. Almost magical. I like to think of that simple moment of delivery with a world of information up in the air before we eagerly retrieved it to become somewhat reliably informed.What did you ever do with all those rubber bands? Let ‘em go!
