Moods

Mine’s on the upswing.  Been up since 3:30 a.m. Ran the In-Laws to the airport for a trip to my nephew’s educated exit from higher ed.  (Read graduation.) Went back to bed for an hour, listening to random music on my iPhone, much of which I hardly knew was on it.  Decided my first tweet of the day would be a request for someone to point out the great song that’s in the world that I haven’t heard yet.

At one point the gray light of the bedroom mixed with the blur in my eyes to make one of those soft focused images that captures the past and future all in a moment and I could only think, “How beautiful.”  Mundane, normal, absent of almost all the usual trappings of composition and structure, but still, there it was, all the elements that touch us rushing together to articulate some unspoken thing inside.  Resonance reverberated through the early hour, and now there’s even a hope of sun for the day.   I’ve decided to enjoy the day, come hell or high water, a metaphor that strikes me just now as callous and inappropriate given the devastation in the midwest.

What is a mood?

Chemicals or spirit; let the battle begin.  Food makes a difference, and drink, and the stimulant of expectations of the day.  The chatter in the coffee shop, my inclination to tune in or not, the lyric of the music (love struck or lost in the cosmos), the beat of the songs I can’t decipher, the remnant of the previous night’s last emotion.  Imagined terrors, from decaying teeth to God’s probable displeasure and the hells each circumstance sends us to, play havoc with our heart rates and respiration, and our mood plummets into a sewer like place where it’s all we can do to just trudge from one side of the room to the other.  Imagined triumphs, from cheering audiences to a final breath taken in satisfaction and easy hope, calm us down, even us out, and let smiles play across our lips like mysterious winds on open oceans, often never even seen.

Like waves they come, these moods of ours.  And we tell ourselves to ignore them, carry on with consistency and faithfulness.  But waves are hard to resist.  Even if we keep cobbling the shoe as we sit in the boat, the pitching of those waves can make us sick and make the shoes we’re working on come out pretty wonky.   But to put the shoe down and just hang on is not quite enough to get us by.  Sometimes, though, it’s all we’ve got.

What are you in the mood for?  Sometimes I’m really in the mood for God.  I tend to wander His way even if I’m not in the mood, but the times when the mood is right can be pretty sweet.   I’m pretty sure Christ wasn’t in the mood to be crucified.  Who knows if he was even in the mood to come to earth when the Father said, “Ok, son.  It’s time.”  But here he came, and there he hung, moods be damned.

What a strange existence we lead.  What a strange paradigm the Creator made.  Divisions, dreams, flooding moods…all of it traveled in the only world our experience knows, a world the apostle said was not home at all.  Travel the strangeness as a creature of another culture, another land, another…what?  Fear God, keep his commandments, and that’s about it.

But we’re in the mood for so much more in this here and now. Songs to write, plays to compose and perform, wounds to bind, peaces to forge, repairs to make so that there’s enough strength to add a new beauty before the sun goes down.

I make my moods.  My moods make me.  We dance, we fight, we slug it out in private, and boy do we get tired of getting punched.  Not in the mood to punch anymore, so today I’m running toward a punchless day, though head-whacking monsters with metal chairs wait on the other side of Noon.  Let ’em wait.  For the moment, I’m running with the high-minded, believing there’s bread and wine in them thar hills, and that somehow, someway, the road I’m running will grant me food and drink to sustain me and mine, whatever moods assail us.

Banking on finding love before the day is done…

In the mood…