Embeddedness

...to steal a new cliche. I think about the morning, Thoreau's favorite time of day, when light cuts over the giant curve of home, painting the clouds far off to the east in subtle yellows and faded whites. Or last night, when the rains never turned to snow. When the spring won once again. I rode home through a heavy drenching sopping spring downpour. Water runnning. The spring was heard and felt and seen. It has carved canyons in the snowdrifts from the blizzard and worn open patches of Earth as large as a Texas ranch. I think about this morning, when the soft frost wilted away at the first rays of sunlight. First the clouds on the distant horizon, then the top of the giant white oak on the Mill Pond, then the Red Oak just beyond my window, and finally me. Water running. And just as I write these words, a mating pair of cardinals land on my windowsill, pecking with their beaks as if to say, what are you doing inside? It is the being part of things that makes us truly human, I think.

And, if we may deduce the opposite, the not being a part of things perhaps causes the greatest suffering. Alienation. Where do I come from? Where do I live? Who am I? There is a contest for identity that has been underway for more than a century now in the United States. There have been winners and loosers. Those of us who believe in the sanctity of life and the profound reality of its existence and our existence in it, those of us who embrace virtue and principle and higher ambitions over accumulation of goods and wealth, we have been losing. Not conquered, mind you, but overwhelmed, marginalized, silenced, and, where necessary, murdered. As another day of brutality unfolds across the globe, I wonder just how it is that we change this trend. Spring might be winning the battle of seasons outside my window, but for the moment, an ice age seems to have settled on human life.