As some readers know, I've been traveling for a while, exploring some of the mountains of the American West.  As always, I reveled in being in the wild once again, waking to the sounds of the forest, walking atop high peaks, looking at picturesque lakes, taking in sunsets over rolling hills.  And as always, I found much time to meditate and ponder this thing that we call life and the God whom I believe is its source, impetus, and sustainer.
     Along the way, I found time to read Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I had been meaning to read it for some time and was thankful that this trip afforded me some hours to do so.  It's a marvelous book, one that blends real with fantastical, magic with rationality, mystery with present imagination.  I came away newly impressed with the need to always look between the lines and be ever willing to embrace dream.
     Given the West's steadfast emphasis on science and logical thinking as the key to unlock all question and mystery, I find it ironic that Marquez's books have sold as well as they have here.  On the other hand, I can easily see why:  we cannot live on rationality, whatever that really is, alone.  We are foremost creatures of imagination.  We wrestle with rationality every day, constantly wanting to think, even if we do not care to admit it, that our emotions and spirit are as real as our brains.  As the Romantics rightly pointed out, even if it means abandoning, if only for a moment, the idea that our minds are the supreme assessors of reality, we want to engage in mystery and dream.  We want to think that life is a surprise.  (After all, as many a psychologist has pointed out, thought always precedes emotion, anyway.  When we emote, we do not reject our mind; we enhance it.)
     Marquez reminds us that maybe, just maybe life will always have a measure of faith, that maybe, just maybe we ought to feel free to let go of the mental constraints that Western rationality has imposed upon us and consider the utility and value of other things coursing through us, things we cannot always explain with reason alone.  In addition, and here I go well beyond what I perceive to be Marquez's original intentions, maybe, just maybe it's perfectly okay to imagine, that is, emote, ponder, and dream, that there could be (or is) a God.