As you are

Oct. 25, 2007

Dear Julie,

Summer finally is giving way to fall in Southeast Missouri. We require heat at night. Nobody's complaining. Summer lasted too long. People wore shorts to the university's homecoming football game Saturday.

A few years ago, DC put a curse on the football team because some players who rented a house from us treated it shabbily. My wife, the Santeria priestess.

Saturday the football team lost to a team that hadn't won in 18 straight games. It must be a coincidence.

Afterward DC told me she has taken the curse off because she feels bad for the football team and coaches. She worries, though, that losing can be a habit that takes some undoing. Dentists know that a nerve sometimes keeps firing even though the stimulus has been removed or quieted. It's called phantom pain.

Go Redhawks anyway.

Just in time for winter, we replaced the boiler in our basement. The old one in our nearly 100-year-old house gave out, just like summer. The old boiler was the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. I chose the new one because it's smaller than a shopping cart and regulated by a computer that enables it to be 95 percent efficient. You want to keep up with the 21st century, I reasoned.

Last weekend a power outage turned our heat off, and the company that installed the boiler couldn't immediately figure out how to turn it back on. Oh no, I thought.

We didn't get terribly cold, but it's not January either.

How this minuscule boiler heats all the water necessary to keep our radiators toasty is a wonder. How most anything works is a wonder to me.

The side of my brain that understands mechanical things must be dormant, in a state of suspended animation. That's how I am. How we are is important to understand.

"You don't see things as they are," the Talmud says. "You see things as you are."

Each of us views life through filters formed in part by our upbringing but, I suspect, much more definitively by the perspective of our souls. Souls know what personalities can't comprehend. Souls know everything is going to be all right no matter what.

On TV, the fires in Southern California look like visions of the end of the world. Like those who lived in New Orleans, those who live in Southern California are reckoning with a devastation they never imagined. The worries of last week have vanished into the smoke.

In the tick-tock hours of the night we wonder why we are here. Taoists say it doesn't matter what you do with your life, what matters is being who you truly are. Then you are in sync with the Way.

"I accept that this world is terrible and full of suffering," writes Deng Ming-Dao in his daily Taoist meditations. "And I also enjoy happiness when it comes to me. As long as I am with Tao, distinctions are superfluous." More phantom pain.

Fall is here. DC and I will root for the football team. We will root for our new boiler. They are programmed to handle adversity.

We all are.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a reporter for the Southeast Missourian.