I'm really frustrated tonight, for a wide variety of reasons. But I'm also in a rather reflective mood.

I was driving home from work tonight, thinking about the Midwest. This was most likely inspired by the Regional Studies class I took a year or so ago - that class gave me a deeper appreciation of the region I live in - what makes it unique and just how beautiful it really is. My paper on 1880s blizzards only deepened my respect for this region. Life is so harsh here. The prairie can be truly unforgiving - severe weather is a regular occurrence. But it's beautiful here. And the prairie for whatever reason holds a vibrant and beautiful culture. It is so sad to watch modernization and globalization slowly by slowly take from this region what makes it unique.

I have been looking through an album of old photos of Newton Hills lately, realizing again just how much life has changed since even the 1970s. Being born in the 1980s, I don't know that I have had the opportunity to appreciate how much life has changed, even since I was born. There is something compelling about looking through photos from 40 years ago...Nothing looks the same, and I have a hard time recognizing places...even though I have spent countless hours in the park in the past three years and know it almost inside out. Just a simple matter of trees can change a place fundamentally. The lake at the park is now surrounded almost entirely by trees, but it has not always been that way. Only thirty years ago it was surrounded by prairie. I suspect that much of the park looks entirely different from its original form, just because of new trees.

I always take the trees for granted. I view them as an unchanging part of a place. This simply isn't true, though. Trees fall down, they are blown down, they are planted. This process creates an ever-changing environment. Tonight I showed a movie on greek constellation myths. It's fascinating to think of the fact that the stars I look at tonight are the same as ancient cultures looked at thousands of years ago. And yet, these stars also are transitory. They too shift with time - new stars being formed and old ones burning out.

Humans depend on things staying the same. We search for it, are comforted it...we choose to believe that our surroundings have remained unchanged, even when something as simple as an old picture proves that the place has not always been the same. And yet we are also fundamentally aware of the ways that things change, at least when it comes to certain things. People know how much people change. We are so very aware of the ways in which we differ from our ancestors, even when in truth we may be more alike than we realize. The political and religious climate is always shifting, leaving humanity to be constantly convinced that *this* generation is superior, that we have finally discovered the truth.

And yet, some things never change, even the things that we seem to assume DO change. Humanity is always flawed. God is always good. We seem to have it all backward, assuming that our physical surroundings are constants and that everything else is shifting, when really, it's the other way around.