Honor

It's always somewhat surprising and a bit disconcerting to see how so much of one's temperance can change in a week. A week ago, I woke up in the morning and remember having the most delicious stretch. It must have lasted for a good couple minutes and included many varied yawns and exclamations of different sizes and shapes.

Last night I finished the 4th western I've read in the past couple weeks. Reading westerns always overwhelm me with a sense of lonely nostalgia. They're filled with tense and mounting danger, a culmination of injustices and vagrant evils that tests the hero's morality and integrity, and finally settles into a simple, determined, grim and lonely fight of Good and Evil. It's about vast strength of character against men "as poisonous as a rattlesnake," and the few and far friendships of kindred spirits that acknowledge each other in the bold, calm, steady gaze that tells of careful scrutiny and reserved judgement. Some part of me desperately desires to find such meaningfulness, to be lost somewhere and then discover the stark, simple depths of my own strength and heart in the face of insurmountable trials; to walk with courage and boldness of spirit. Westerns always have beautiful, wild, lonely areas where great men emerge out of the dust to appear with magnificent strength and determination, walking a broad path of justice and honor, and then disappear over the mountains into far horizons from which we can only imagine dwells Courage and Integrity, where men grown to become men, where "they cut them wide, and they cut them deep."

It's interesting to think that while westerns have a reputation for violence in gunfights and Indian battles, what I've found most common in westerns are always in-depth, introspective characters that carry a lonely, wild courage, and a deep, educated wisdom of self-perception, born of simple, undeniable truths of Life and Honor.