It used to be we had families, and we cared deeply about what became of them. Now it seems we have just the form of kinship, and what we’re really after is the satisfying of those whims which rage in our individual hearts.
It’s hard to talk this way though. Partially because it’s dark and bleak and self-indicting. It’s also difficult because so many people will tell you “the world, the world, it has always been as it is now.” But it’s not true. For we actually change the world.
And just like a child who grows and transforms daily right in front of us, it’s all too gradual, and our distractions too many, for us to notice it powerfully happening. This is why we keep things like photographs, paintings, diaries, journals, History books. We need to be reminded of progress and backsliding.
It’s the same reason we have compasses, else we would lose our sense of True North and Due South. An weighty regard for family and heritage were once a sign that a society was healthy. Once we too were free from the desperate clinging to just one life — our own — which is now more characteristic of how the age we’re in, though hardly we’d admit it.
What got me thinking this way this morning were 12 stones. A dozen rocks? Yes. These stones were large pieces of the river bed carried by 1 leader a piece from the 12…
