Ash Wednesday

Summer portrait of Snow Road. Not gone forever.

And a miracle--I found what I thought was lost forever, the ludicrously over-mourned data, on fat Tuesday, the day when we feast before we take the ashes. The day when life seems unbearably lush, rich, full beyond imagination. And today, the next day, the long-awaited satellite dish arrives, giving me at last a connection to the great inter-web that links us all. No. I jest. But I do have a feeling of strange Jim Morrison-like doors of consciousness are opening.

I resisted buying internet for a long time, though. Hardcore. Being without it was perhaps the thing that made me feel most isolated about being here, and maybe the thing that I was the proudest of. So I had to let go. It was all pure egoism, and finally I chose to make things easier on myself rather than more difficult.

The internet is also very expensive. My resistance was born from frugality, and now I have through economic caution to the wind.

But now I have both internet and data back. Images that I thought were gone forever I have again, and I have all of Lent to play with pictures and videos and internet, instead of living in ascetic austerity, the way I'm meant to during this season of suffering. It feels like spring, like I'm coming awake from a long hibernation. I didn't get everything in my hunt through the savage hard drive, but just that I had the persistence to keep fighting for the 10GB or so I managed to salvage seems psychotic. Or maybe brave.

Or it was faith alone that gave me back these few gifts. My cup is full. It runneth over.

I remember having this feeling before, wanting to memorialize the end of one season, as the next begins. The church calendar cycles every year, and I climb the seven-story mountain, arriving at the new season, same as the old. But new. The air is new. The mountain is new. Behold, all things are made new.