New and Renew
A guest contribution by O.G. Rose
The piece of poetry ’New and Renew’ comes from Resonant Man guest contributor Daniel Garner who, with his wife Michelle, authors philosophy and fiction under the pen name O.G. Rose. Written from the gentle fields of Virginia where he lives on ancestral homestead with his 4 children ’new and renew’ explores the wisdom and necessity of finding the new in all that is around us.
Building on his guest session in the Resonant Man during the Month of Renewal, It suggests that one of the most important challenges facing masculinity today is a constant search for newness and novelty. A hunger which erodes our capacity to be, belong and know the rich kingdom that is all around us in family, thought and nature. New and Renew calls men to consider the profound path of turning from hungrily seeking ’newness’ to finding the spirit of renewal in their own lives.
New and Renew
The light with morning weight skips across the roof of our fading Oldsmobile, the porch, and then into the window—it breaks, transparent, and slants down onto the cheap drip coffee machine. Purring. A red dot-light on a pressed button glows, and, though for a decade straight we have then walked away and showered, efficiently, to news and music from smart-devices, we today hover and break our record. Our friends are traveling. We are here for the thousandth, eight-hundredth, and twenty-fifth time. We are responsible, but this day-break—only like every morning—we question our ability to respond. We feel danger and feel. This is not mid-life: we are either amid life or not. “Middle” as a word of “halfway” testifies against the all-time without which we feel “out of it”—“fragmented out of our-mosaics”—“middle” is “caught between,” if there is prayer for captivation. And we have never intended to pray, hovering before coffee dripping that does and doesn’t point to water dripping of Luke that does and doesn’t point to the end of all things—odd that change of flavor, on the small-rudder-tongue, from “judgment” to “justice”—but if prayer is not empty, life is of miracles, and unintended prayer can be, revelatory, of things not seen.
We have not seen the world. If we chose, we could simply not show up for work or for our family or for the places of regularity and instead hurry outside to our Oldsmobile and drive so far away that we could meet people and tell them where we were from and they would just stare. A great unknown and thrill, but to do something different is not always to do something new. Something new: we will drink a cup of coffee that will only ever be that cup of coffee, and do so for the thousandth time. There is all the newness around we could ever drink in, but it will take effort and sweat and suffering like Achilles to feel what Achilles never fought himself into living. God-images who overcome themselves are not demi-gods who overcome others. This is the work of the new man. Our cup. Against the temptation to do something new and instead live as if everything that never changes is never the same, and when each thing happens for the hundredth time it will be like the thousandth time and as if it’s never happened. And we will not wish any of it away and stop looking around what is there to be seen. But this is a work of fiction unless we decide it is not.
Our hand rises in the kitchen and opens a cabinet for a white mug we bring down onto the counter, and our other hand reaches forward—it brightens in the morning ray—and, around the handle of the carafe, our fingers fold and grip. Our work is to care to notice. And now we do not hover over the formless and depths of possibility but take a stand. Nothing has changed and will not be the same. We will never live what we have lived and nothing will be missed. We lightly tug out the carafe from the machine, lift it into the air, tip, and, over our cup, pour full in the light of days that begin us and us and us. One sip is enough.
—O.G Rose