Recovery

It's four a.m. when the birds note the changing light, ever so slight, that indicates a new day. From their perches around the neighborhood they begin an insistent song. Is it celebration, or do they believe their own voices are needed to arouse the sun? This ceremony has such regularity and gives the heart a boost. Better than we, the birds appreciate this life, this earth, these rhythms. They are not immune to reconstructing nature to their needs, building nests and pulling life from the Earth to feed their young, but they do so with a kind of deep honor not seen among humans today. Reverence and humility, joy and appreciation. For us, the mornings are blasted out of alarm clocks and cold showers and a deep desire for another vacation. I see the workers in their dress shirts and ties heading to another day at the computer terminal, sweating off the last remains of last night's alcohol, the necessary elixir for drowning out that psychic pain, that sense of unfulfillment, the dying hope that someday, somehow, somewhere, life will be about something more than this incessant grind. I know there is more. I watch the white spruce behind my house slowly build its seeds in this mast year, more than it will need, the squirrels will eat well this winter. I see the mulberry tree at the bend in Front Street dropping its profligate load as well, feeding insects and birds, and even the molds and fungus. All life truly lived contributes more than it takes. Our modern desperation is part of a big lie, a treadmill to nowhere, the slow desecration of the human soul in the interest of greed and power.

This disease is thick among us now. I can point to some who who suffer completely and wonder why, and even others who suffer completely and believe they are well. I know one man who lives so deeply in his lies that each pitiful move he makes appears to him as progress and light and yet, the smoke and mirrors are everywhere. Titles and false accolades, so he believes, can lift him into places where he does not belong and has earned no place. The tragedy, of course, is how terribly it will drain the last remnants of his withered soul when the truth come clean. And the truth always comes clean. Always.

"When we are unhurried and wise, we percieve that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, -- that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality," Thoreau wrote in _Walden_. And the petty have read this and not noticed it is refering to them. I find this fact curious.