Salvation South magazine editor Chuck Reece spends almost all his time thinking and writing about the American South. But sometimes, his mind starts wrestling with far bigger questions than what we Southerners read, listen to, or eat. This leads him to frustration — and sometimes, to a good lesson.

We're just specks of dust on the windshield of the universe.

We're just specks of dust on the windshield of the universe.

Credit: Adobe Stock

TRANSCRIPT:

Chuck Reece: I spend most of my time thinking about life in the American South. Humans make community, and community makes culture, and the culture of the South is the thing that fascinates me the most. 

But as a Texas songwriter once sang, "my mind’s got a mind of its own." And sometimes, it decides to think bigger than it has any business thinking. On those days, I ask myself, “How is it that my life feels so big to me when I know that I’m just a little speck of dust on the windshield of the entire universe?”

If you ask yourself that, you are not alone and you never have been. The question has occupied philosophers and theologians forever. 

The stoic philosophers believed human lives have meaning if we can learn to see ourselves as part of the natural order — and learn that while we can control certain little pieces of that order, we must accept what we cannot control. And of course, many people pray to God for the wisdom to know the difference between those two things. Christian theologians see that natural order as divine, ordained by God, and believe every human has their place in this divine oneness. 

But often, when I weigh what this philosopher said against what that theologian said, I get all tied up in knots. I get frustrated. Figuring it out seems impossible. 

Then I remember I get some of my best lessons about big things from reading small things, like a poem. The magazine I edit, Salvation South, just awarded our first annual New Poets Prize — a competition open to any poet in the South whose poems had never been collected and published in a book. The winner was a writer from Kentucky named Emma Aprile, and I want to read you a little piece of one of her winning poems. It was called “Before Breakfast, a Few Impossible Things.”

Emma has two kids, a boy and a girl, and she begins her poem by remembering how her daughter used to tell her “I’m big” when she was comparing herself to her brother, then say “I’m tiny,” or “I’m a kitty,” when she was loving being small. 

Emma then writes this:

When I try to explain to the kids where the dinosaurs are, or where they aren’t, not any longer, the world spins away from me, drenched in the gray, washed-out, watery smell of futility, our blip of existence on the timeline barely a fraction of the Cretaceous and I agree with my daughter, kitty, baby, we are big, we are tiny, impossible to believe, impossible to hold.

Emma’s poem reminds me that yeah, we are small, and we are big. We are whatever we dream we can be. As long as we remember how to look at this big old goofy world through the eyes of a child.

You can read all of Emma Aprile’s award-winning poems at SalvationSouth.com. 

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Salvation South editor Chuck Reece comments on Southern culture and values in a weekly segment that airs Fridays at 7:45 a.m. during Morning Edition and 4:44 p.m. during All Things Considered on GPB Radio. Salvation South Deluxe is a series of longer Salvation South episodes which tell deeper stories of the Southern experience through the unique voices that live it. You can also find them here at GPB.org/Salvation-South and wherever you get your podcasts.