The children are back to school where we live, masked and excited to return. Tomorrow it's my turn to pick up. Only a few more days of summer, but not a summer of yore. I don't think many will look back on these last 10 weeks with nostalgia. With the unvaccinated, the Delta variant, wildfires and floods, many of us feel grateful for the vaccine but tense nevertheless. Nightly I feel sorrow for the Afghans on the tarmac and in hiding who need help that's not coming. We haven't done our best.
Margaret Renkl, a Southern nature writer, quotes poet Mary Oliver:
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
In a NYT essay Renkl reminds readers that in the midst of grieving what we have wrought, we should still appreciate the good there is. She names the bumblebees, goldfinches, red-tailed hawks, black-eyes Susans and mock strawberries--all fauna and flora that lie outside my North Carolina door.
Remember the song from the musical "Porgy and Bess," Summer Time and the Livin' is Easy? Ms Renkl says that for no creature on earth is the living easy. I agree. Not for the baby birds nesting in the wreath in my courtyard, not for the chipmunk under our deck who avoids the resident hawk in peril of his life, not for the unvaccinated who drive this pandemic, not for the rest of us. We have a dear South African friend, a widower, whose girlfriend has declined the vaccine; he now has break-through Covid. No, the livin' is not easy.
The UN report on climate change (AR6 Climate Change 2021) sets our task clearly before us. Our guilt is inescapable.
But to ignore the good that we experience everyday is to trudge with head down, missing the stars. We cannot move forward without minding the beauty that is. You have to prize something to want to save it. Our democracy, our diversity, our earthly home . . . . "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Matthew 6:21
Perhaps I'm looking for a way out, permission to find occasions for joy even though others are suffering. But perhaps that is healthy. To find moments of joy even when we ourselves are suffering. Only then can we work hard to preserve the good.
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