An Academic and a Leaf Blower

I am attending a conference on the realities how people explore and live their spiritual/social lives within a sense of belonging to multiple religions rather than just one. The conference is going very well when, suddenly, an unfortunate and overwhelming experience of boredom arises and detonates in my brain and body. The well-intentioned and well-educated voice of the presenter becomes a drone that I cannot detangle into coherent thoughts and I decamp from my stiff wooden chair to a to a quiet space at the back end of the conference hall hidden by cloth partitions. We are on the fifth floor and it's a beautiful view that looks out over an autumnal scene of the university's central square. The trees are in full fall regalia and dazzling in their final show of hope before the long, wet winter sets in. It is dry, that is, the speech goes on and the speaker's voice is relentlessly mono-dynamic and firmly committed to the dense repose of academic-speak. It goes on and on and I listen to the words, familiar with the ethos, my gaze wondering over the square. It feels good to stand. I finally realize that while the words are drifting into my mind it is actually a leaf blower that I hearing. A worker is bundled in a large yellow coat and over-sized pants like the kind people wear on the tarmac at airports. She is bearing a gas powered leaf blower on her back. I can just hear it, even five stories up behind a glass window with a prominent academic droning on in the speakers directly above my head. The task at hand is to herd the disparate, dry leaves scattered throughout the square toward an opening in the low bulwark wall where students sit and talk when the sun shines. The leaves curl and swirl like a wave in the push of the invisible, manufactured wind. They spray out and only loosely obey the intention of the task. They drift up, and over, and out, and away, in their doomed campaign to maintain chaos and decorate the (now) noisy square. The speaker is talking about multiple religious belonging. It is the theme of the entire conference. How a person can claim (or how they might fear to claim) truths from numerous traditions within their person or congregation. Exclusivist claims of religions hold people in (or down) even as they hold out new possibilities of being and expression. The speaker is wrestling with the tensions of traditional structures of belief to open themselves to new modalities of hybridity and innovation. And to his credit, and credentials, the speaker is making some very salient points of which I might even agree with some. But no matter.... I am in the square. I am with the leaves as they resist the machine of conformity even as they loosely lilt and lift, drift over and around the bulwark opening and out of sight. In all of this, as the words move and the leaves move, I never see the air that becomes wind or words. And I find room for a smile thinking about how the leaves do not change as they move over the wall. Push them around as much as you like; they are the same as before, only in new place of being.