Midwinter Bleak

a poetic reflection

I remember when life felt small, when my own life resembled that of a heron who spent her days wading in the waters of a quiet lake.

Slow days when peace was palpable.

Nothing else mattered but the unobscured view of a bright sun and the caress of a soft breeze.

Now it feels as if every decision holds existential weight, tipping the scales in the cosmos toward some unavoidable collision.

Deciding which brand of eggs to buy at the grocery store is a moral choice—standing there and scanning the labels trying to decipher which farm animals are treated humanly.

The News is a glass ball, the future staring back at us. Screens. Selfies. Surveillance…the bane of existence.

We talk of the A.I. bubble and the extinction of jobs. Will a college degree be obsolete? What of art?

We worry if voting is rigged by a foreign dictator…if inflation will taper off…if interest rates will go down?

Modern day leaders are soulless Pharaohs. The government—utterly corrupt. It is winter and the world is on fire.

Sea levels are rising. Marine biologists are calling attention to a phenomenon known as ‘ghost forests’ caused by salt water intrusion seeping into forested wetlands along eastern coastal shores.

The images are bleak, almost apocalyptic in appearance. What remains are rows of skeleton trees against an opaque landscape.

The term “unprecedented” doesn’t quite capture the magnitude of all that’s unfolding simultaneously.

As of late, I’ve been taking long walks to the river. At sundown it never fails, flocks of geese, hundreds of them in V-shape formation fly in unison over cold waters. They congregate each night, calling to one another.

As far as I can tell, they are having the most important conversations. As far as I can tell, they haven’t forgotten the sheer delight of being alive.

Photograph Credit: Eugene Golovesov

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Passage by Rainer Maria Rilke

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered 
to earth's intelligence
we would rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves 
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused. 

So, like children, we begin again 
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him. 

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