it's another beautiful day here in paradise. the trees shimmer and swell, repeating crescendos and diminuendos in the soft breeze which rises from the silver still valley below. there is no birdsong to accompany this early morning percussion. everything else is perfect serenity.
and so i sit and wait: an imprisoned voyeur, held captive by the majesty of this "bee-loud glade", unable to break its puissant hold on me.
the stilly seeming is belied by closer inspection. everywhere i look there is another urgent drama unfolding - ants and beetles frantically scurry through the dirt at my feet while invisible multitudes of flies make their presence known only by the high-pitched whine of their wings.
not fifteen feet from my head, a deer picks its way through the trees - its cotton-streak tail switching back and forth to the cicadan rhythm of a hidden host of crickets. its call is surprising: something akin to an electric saw, rather than the mewling bleat one might expect.
a tiny frog leaps through the mowed grass which towers over it, one exhausting foot at a time. an impossibly beautiful spider's web hangs in mid-air, suspended between two trees on my left, thick-laden with dew. a hairy green caterpillar wrinkles its way across me, its tiny sucker-feet tickling the hairs on my forearm. i watch another labour to the tip of a twig, rear and stretch into the inviting sky, then turn and begin the slow descent to terra firma to await the longed-for metamorphosis.
damselflies mate-dance all around me; clinging to one-another's thorax, they kiss-touch their abdomens to form almost perfect cobalt and emerald heart-shapes.
all this glory is missed in my usual rush, my busy-ness, my felt-need to 'do' not simply 'be'. i race frantically after my creator, longing for his company and touch, yet here he waits in stillness.
today is yet another difficult day to be an atheist.
god's grandeur
the world is charged with the grandeur of god.
it will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
crushed. why do men then now not reck his rod?
generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
and all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
and wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
and for all this, nature is never spent;
there lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
and though the last lights off the black west went
oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
because the holy ghost over the bent
world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
gerald manley hopkins (1844-89)
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