View From the Deep Woods
February 27, 2024
Second edit, August 31, 2024
Final edit and repost September 10, 2024
Many movies, TV shows, novels, and personal stories have people who get turned around in the woods, or accidently pass through a black hole, or experience some other type of conveyance into another world of consciousness…
Lost in confusing and dangerous situations, there is a struggle to find the way home. Sci-Fi is full of such intrigues. My favorites are like the Star Trek and Captain America series.
Like the Westerns I watched in the 50’s, they all have moral and ethical overtones woven through and through. There was one subtle difference, however. Some of those old black and white productions even used heroes praying to God and even Bible verses to round out and solidify the life lessons learned in the short treks through different episodes of the characters’ experiences.
Rock ’n’ Roll music in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, it seems to me, to have had similar themes of getting our heads and lives straight, getting out of tight situations, or moral dilemmas. Whether in romantic relationships or on more transcendent paths, many were about how to get through this life without damaging it, hurting others, or damaging ourselves…
From Genesis through Revelations, the Bible is replete with the stories of real people living real lives, how they got into trouble and how they may have gotten out of it. There Is nothing secretive about them. Those people have good traits but they have bad traits as well. This Book is not about fantasy, but it is about real life. The books of the Bible are all about a struggle to find the way home, that is, about getting back onto and staying on, the “strait and narrow.” (Note: spell check might insist upon “straight” but the Bible says “strait” — a word sailors might understand…)
By the by, since those early days of my youth, I was learning these principles during my deep dive into the 60’s, progressing through the 70’s, and continuing up ’til today, a half century later.
Our Culture has drifted far, far away from any strictures on morality and ethics, and, as I see it, we are getting deeper and deeper into the woods, further and further from home, as in the tale of Hansel and Gretel. Many have an unsettling sense of that and make attempts to reach back into time to escape that black hole we are falling into. Unfortunately, the crows seem to have eaten up all the bread crumbs…
Sadly, for us, there is no magical time machine to take us back to some imagined “good old days.” As children of the Greatest Generation, we have no idea, not the slightest concept, of what our parents and grandparents had to go through to provide us with that ideal Norman Rockwell idealistic painting of life…
Today, as the world slips sideways into chaos, we older folks yearn for the times we had as children at play. However, we are all grown up now, and most of us, if not all of us, have no idea how to recreate that world we believe we lived in.
Many from more modern generations have chosen a menagerie of distractions and never give such things a second thought — actually, not even a first look.
First of all, not everybody lived that life, nothing even close to it. Yet, an awful lot of people today desperately yearn for it anyway. Grabbing for a gold ring while riding on some sort of crazy merry-go-round, we grab at anything and everything.
Trying to illustrate what I am trying to get at, I had this rather frustrating conversation with a technician from a WiFi service Help Center. While he was working on my internet problem, he started talking about what was going on in the world. It was soon obvious that he was a person enthralled with QAnon and their conspiracy theories.
Now, I’m an open-minded kind of guy, and so, I was interested with what he might have to say and things he might have to say about the world and its problems…
What he had to say, and what he repeatedly said over and over again was “Follow the dots. Just follow the dots…”
Okay, I thought, and asked “What dots?”
“Just follow the dots!”
Again, okay… “Please, can you give me an example of one of those dots?”
“The dots! Just follow the dots!”
That nonsense continued for some time until he had fixed my computer problem. I thanked him and said goodbye.
So, I sat for a while thinking about that apparently intelligent and skilled young man who eagerly embraced some invisible and incomprehensible ideal. His passionate search for what I assume is some kind of “Paradise Lost,” and the incident experience left me saddened.
How can such passion overcome sustainable reasoning?
I still haven’t figured out that kind of mindset, but it seems to me like one of those Connect-the- Dots coloring books for kids. The child can connect the dots and see the Kitty Cat appear, and then color it anyway they want… but it still appears as a Kitty Cat… the dots in this technician’s invisible diagram were scattered willy-nilly all over his pages…
In our Society and its Culture in America today, there is a lot of connecting such dots — a full page of thousands and thousands of dots — dots which no one can explain reasonably. And by “reasonably” I mean in the context of the following MerriamWebster.com definition:
critical thinking
1: the act or practice of thinking critically (as by applying reason and questioning assumptions) in order to solve problems, evaluate information, discern biases, etc.
Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. — Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
2: the set of skills, methods, etc. involved in critical thinking
Media literacy enlivens how our schools teach critical thinking by serving as a bridge between the classroom and the world in which our young people live most of their waking lives. — Wally Bowen
Using the same skills used for centuries — analysis, synthesis, and evaluation — we must look at digital literacy as another realm within which to apply elements of critical thinking.
- Barbara Jones-Kavalier and Suzanne Flannigan
— sometimes hyphenated when used before another noun
Helping students develop critical-thinking skills and information literacy is one of the core missions of libraries everywhere.
— Nancy Pearl
Please, instead of trying to connect some invisible dots, creating some sort of amorphous animal, always try to connect those bright dots like the ones illustrated above.
Don’t get lost in the woods.
Proverbs 4:5–9, NIV: “Get wisdom, get understanding;
do not forget my words or turn away from them.Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you.
The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding. Cherish her, and she will exalt you; embrace her, and she will honor you. She will give you a garland to grace your head and present you with a glorious crown.”
So, reach out to Jesus, because He’s reaching out to you.
