Skeletons of Meaning in anticlimatic

Discovered something this afternoon while I was on a hike through some old farmland way out on the seasonal roads west of town. It wasn’t much of a discovery, nothing I hadn’t really seen before many times. Just a large pile of field stones buried in moss and leaves and young tree cover, just inside the tree line on a bit of a hill that lead up to a field. From the woods I could see the crest of the hill, where the field began, and a lazy drunken daisy chain of rotten barbed wire fence posts sagging every which way yet still holding one another up somehow. There must have been some kind of trail to the pile of field stones when they were placed, likely carved by a tractor, but any road or trail had long been swallowed by a fresh generation of trees that now seemed older than any pile of rocks could be.

I passed and couldn’t help but think about who staked that fence out, and ran that wire. Who labored all of those rocks into that pile. Someone did in some longago. At some point that pile of rocks meant something to someone. It was the fruit of their labor; the foundation of a smoother soil in which to crop their futures; a monument to their hopes and dreams. There was meaning in the object. Meaning long gone.

There is little more devastating to me than watching meaning die for someone. Fortunately we don’t often have to bear witness to this. Meaning seldom dies a swift death, like the way it does when one learns santa claus is not real. More often it fades slowly in a person, or a family, until it is recalled only once in a while. Then never again, after they pass. Yet more can be created. The world overflows with it. What other meaning is there to life than meaning itself?

Yet it always saddens me to see the remnants of it. I want to rescue it. To rush over and scoop it up and clean it off and tell it that it’s OK now. It’s back in the fold. The lost meaning of someone else has become found meaning for me.