Now Playing: Coldplay, "X&Y," "White Shadows."

This morning after going to the gym, I posted a package to Indonesia. It's always amusing to me how posting something to an international destination makes one feel important--even more than posting something domestic.

When we were kids, we used to post things to Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen. I remember my mother buying the special blue air mail envelopes, which are actually stationery that fold into envelopes of their own. She would write over every available centimeter of paper, and sometimes she would let us scribble something of ours before she folded it up like an origami animal and took it to the post office.

And there's always the hope that something will come back in return--a letter with a colorful stamp on it, or a parcel with exotic food. Once our friends brought back incense that looked like crystallized rocks or brown sugar. We've never burned it. I've always wondered how it would smell.

The parcel I posted today was one of these readymade US Postal Service boxes. They, too, fold up like origami. Some engineer must have had a delightful time deciding just where to put the scoring so that the sides would fold together properly and hold together with just one strip of adhesive down one side.

I, however, am not an engineer, and I have spent most of the day trying to cram my brain full of Literature in English for the exam on Saturday. Currently a tall stack of books sits beside me on my desk, including titles by George Eliot, John Steinbeck, Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and Maya Angelou. Last night I dreamed literature.

Whether or not any of it sticks for the exam, I have started writing poetry again. With my head so full of words, I have to put something out in order to fit something else in. This shrapnel-style survey of literature does leave one with an overwhelming sense of elegy, of melancholy. No matter what era I dip into, I find humans fighting for meaning--even if that is the assertion that there is none--and, failing, falling back miserably into their own cobwebs.

Cobwebs and adders' eggs is how Isaiah 59 describes our efforts. Apt. We cannot clothe ourselves with our works, and our creative attempts in so many cases only hatch poison. I love the promise of the following chapters: instead of snakes and spiders, God turns His people into a garden full of fruitful trees.