Regarding the Next

"Uncertainty. That is appropriate for matters of this world. Only regarding the next are we vouchsafed certainty."

From "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs" by the Coen Brothers

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Dear Alex,

Feeling special about yourself is a matter of uncertainty. I am not as special as I have thought myself to be. The last sentence is an ego crusher, crushed egg on face.

If I were to describe this working week of all weeks, I would say it is most special for me so far this year. I have been preparing with my team specifically for this week over the past many months. Aims and frames of ends and endpoints have been specified by specialists without specks of error. People and projects are progressing beautifully. I feel special to be here.

My being special - a halo of vanity in hot flashes - feels especially uncertain, rattling as jade in sewer, when I begin to see the certainty of how truly and extraordinarily ordinary I am in being human. We want to fit in as much as we want to stand out, to be different but accepted.

I must be special to be invited to special places with a group of special people this week. As I think about my teammates presenting the best of their work today, I feel happy about their God-gifted efforts and abilities translated into measurable success. I have much to learn from their grace.

But I am not swanlike. I lose track of where I am. If I don’t know how I have gotten here, then I am not sure how to go there. Only regarding the next uncertainty are we vouchsafed certainty.

With your wife and you last week, I watched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix. I suspect you know every film on- and off-screen in hues and humor written, produced and directed by the Coen Brothers. This is my very first one and I am only mid way.

It is certainly more than a show or even a ballad as titled. This 6-piece cinematic anthology is a series of verbs in question: verbs that drive us to welcome every new morning, the needful things, our ways we verb ourselves into our true identity. The Coen’s are lovers of real movie-making in the making of love through sacrifice, change and cry, casting us down in valley and up to cliff and sky in mise-en-scène and unspoken landscapes of the human spirit.

In the uncertainties of this world, we can be certain of this ballad: seek our special verbs, your needful things, my true identity in action, the one true love - sacrifice change cry, trust question resist submit play delight explore - and pair our verbs in hand with daily living. This is our special ballad.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

I rushed home right after to kneel down and cry to God at my bedside the day I watched "No Country for Old Men" in the theater.  And what does that mean?

That when I run out of words I cry.  That greatness is still possible and God has a hand in it.  That "America is a sick body that sometimes tries to imagine what it would feel like to be well."  That God is getting old.

With "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs," it is again a time to cry.  If the range of human experience is a country, the Coen movie straddles it like a cowboy, on or off his horse, with or without his gun.

Something you said to me maybe a week or two ago stuck with me.  "At the end you are a writer," that's what you said.  What came before and after that had nothing to do with writing.

And I wonder if it is a line to cry over.

Yours, Alex