And When I Die . . . Postscript

After posting the original essay on Friday, we left for the lake.  I had selected a novel to take that I intended to read several years ago:  The Loop by Nicholas Evans.  Evans is the author of The Horse Whisperer – an excellent book that I enjoyed immensely, except for the ending.

The Horse Whisperer was made into a movie starring Robert Redford and an excellent supporting cast.  Worth noting is that a young Scarlett Johansson in one of her early film roles was a pivotal character who, in my opinion, nailed it!  While the movie couldn’t plumb the depths of character that Evans could in the expanse of his novel, I was satisfied with the characters’ development.  And the movie was one of those rare examples of holding true to the book except for the ending.  I was thankful for the “Hollywood ending” in this case because I thought it was a much better resolution than the book’s.  But I highly recommend both the book and the movie.

The weather at the lake was beautiful.  I sat on the back of the boat with our dog lying beside me on the seat and my wife sitting on the other seat reading.  The temperature was in the low 80s.  A gentle breeze – one strong enough to deserve appreciative observation, but not enough to warrant “windy” consideration – blew across the boat with a pleasant cooling effect.  Wakes from boats in the distance had diminished into gentle waves that slowly rolled under the boat in a relaxing rocking motion.

I opened the book, read the acknowledgements, then found the following passage attributed to Black Elk, of the Oglala Sioux.  It seemed to capture the essence of the “circle of life” I referenced in the essay, so I thought I would replicate it for an additional post.

Everything the Power of the World

does is done in a circle.  The sky is

round and I have heard that the earth

is round like a ball and so are all the stars.

The wind, in its greatest power, whirls.

Birds make their nests in circles,

for theirs is the same religion as ours.

The sun comes forth and goes down

again in a circle.  The moon does the

same and both are round.  Even the

seasons form a great circle in their

changing and always come back again

to where they were.  The life of a man

is a circle from childhood to childhood.

And so it is in everything where power moves.