All Along The Watchtower

In this Desert season,

we stumble day after day,

searching for our oasis.

Along the way strange things appear,

some meaningful, some hollow,

some real, others only mirages.

But this one is real.

We can’t deny it.

Every desert has a landmark.

A place that calls out

to those who journey through.

And ours stands there, unmoving

like a skyscraper

cutting through the desert haze:

The Watchtower.

The Watchtower matters

because it elevates us,

if only briefly,

above everything we’re tangled in

down below.

From that height,

even our heaviest problems

shrink to dust.

Down below,

we are out of reach

and unheard inside our Watchtower.

We like it this way.

Up here, we sit alone

with our thoughts,

our own voices, our own beliefs,

untouched, unchallenged, unquestioned.

It reminds me of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986),

when Sloan looks over downtown Chicago and says,

“The city looks so peaceful from up here.”

to which Ferris replies, almost smug,

“Anything is peaceful from 1,353 feet away.”

Our perspective can transform chaos into calm.

Distance doesn’t erase the noise;

it simply reframes it.

This is why we hesitate to come down.

Nothing matches the feeling of being up here.

When we finally touch the earth again,

we feel like outsiders,

the only ones who have seen

from the Watchtower.

Nothing on the ground feels the same;

we saw it all from above.

Among the noise, we stay in our heads.

Words refuse to carry

what the view gave us.

That feeling,

never theirs,

becomes ours alone.

We want to speak it,

but the words won’t do it justice.

So we let the moment stand,

not as something to explain,

but something to grow from.

We came down from this Watchtower

different than when we climbed it.

And that shift,

subtle as it is,

becomes a quiet kind of hope.