Who picks up the Trail of Clothes Beautiful People Leave when they go to Bed Together

This is one of my favorite thoughts or reflections over the summer. The feeling(which I will get to) has mostly atrophied in the face of school and crew and day-to-day, month-to-month responsibilities.

The idea is that all aspects of a person's life need to be taken care of. Someone has to do the work from pulling plants out of the ground for food to designing/building the pens and pencils used for signing business mergers.

I have always loved the image of a pair quickly taking off one another's clothes after a particularly wonderful evening or long separation. Walking as they kiss, a lot. There is an honesty there that can't be bought, a desperation, a giving up. It is an escape from all of the arbitrary signals and subtle plays of the modern world and a return to something we as a race or society or animal have enjoyed since our beginning, whatever that may be. I find it very comforting that more or less, we cannot continue without sex.

So anyway, they have an excellent night. What next? And its this contrast that I love so much more than the actual passion and heat. The difference between ravenous hunger and content fullness. The satisfied appetite that provides a human foundation for survival in the most transcendent definition of the word.

Afterwards, someone has to pick up their clothes. The contrast between the glamour of their lifestyles and the triviality of the tasks that inevitably surround all of us. In this vision, they pick up those clothes.

All of our glamour and complexity and discovery... Everything is supported by a million simple things. The food we eat, the clothes we wear. Our cars. The customs and oral histories, complex rituals. These are something like luxuries. Not so much in the sense that they are frivolous, but certainly in the sense that we could not have come by them without the creativity and devotion of others. And certainly not without our own ability to switch between embracing the complex and intense and the simple and calm.

The engineer must practice problems and engage real objects.

Nurses have to know human patients and standards of measurement and pharmaceutical theory.

Students absolutely must know the pieces of nature scholars discovered to create lessons. Students must know concretes and abstractions.

Writers must have lives and a strong grasp of language. Pastors must have strong and dynamic relationships and a solid, reliable understanding of God.

Everyone must embrace what they perceive and also embrace what they think about what they perceive.

We cannot get by on thoughts alone or feelings alone or spirituality alone. Or any other aspect of the human body. We cannot live by simply maintaining our physical health.