Accolade

I love this Earth. I feast on the vistas and marvel at its life. I admire the slow persistence of the things this place has spawned and relish the opportunity to be a small but conscious part. I write, in the end, to celebrate the fact of life and living and to remind you that you too are part of this incredible, sublime, unexplainable miracle. Do not waste this gift.

The colors continue their slow creep into the forest canopy. Maples have more red. Weeping willows, more yellow. A lighter ruddiness to the oak. And, up close, like unfolding hands, cups within cups, the buds gradually open for another seasons. "Nature will bear the closest inspection," Thoreau wrote in "Natural History of Massachusetts." "She invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain."

Behind the tree tops shooting high into the sky, contrail cumuli mark the paths of a thousand travellers through the early morning sunrise. After a minute, another silver bullet seems to coast across the very top of the world. On NPR this morning, they asked if Move-On.org hadn't lost all of its battles because it had moved too far to the left. Too far to the left? As if we've seen the left anywhere near American politics in the past 30 years. The center is now staked off as "leftwing" and the remaining vestiges of goodwill and caring for fellow being, the idea that ethical and just social action is wanted, have been sent beyond the margins of discourse altogether, into the exile of inattention. We prefer the violence of war, the barbarity of absolute certainty. Our nation would rather bleed to death from unacknowledged foolishness than make the slightest adjustment to the facts of its existence. Too far to the left? Pity us.