Empathy.
This word burst into and of my heart come fall, 2003. After spending the day talking to nature with two close friends, we returned to my college dorm room, expecting to speak to aliens. We obviously weren’t in a dorm room but rather a secret chamber buried deep in the bowels of an alien ship. While waiting to be discovered, our trio got talking about how best to engage the extra-terrestrials without catalyzing our demise.
Idea-laden crests and troughs later, my friend dp boiled some water in his blue kettle and walked over to make tea. Looking at the water-furnace then, the words ‘Blue Scarecrow’ escaped my mouth. dp glared at me for five full seconds.
‘Yes… Blue Scarecrow,’ he nodded before smiling.
Good old Pauly had also been pulled into orbit, he grinning with sufficient Eureka-spilling delight to set a solar system alight.
So, why all this madness? We’d just discovered Empathy. Each of us instinctively knew the kettle was imbued with the essence of being, and although inanimate, it was offering us – through existential grace – the ability to make warm tea which would undoubtedly go down good, calm, and wonderful in our hour of need.
Many years have passed since, and looking back now, I still believe Blue Scarecrow defines what Empathy means: the color of the sea and sky, technically inanimate yet efficacious in multitudinous ways, offering hope and weather and fish and dreams and all that jazz for the price of a smile.
So next time you’re down, confused, or simply feeling blue, remember that out there exists a similarly-colored scarecrow singing the hymns of angels beneath a big ol’ fat sky, and in his or her forgotten dreams lives the very secret that makes life worth living.