Comfort

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Once, years ago, I stood on a levee in the midst of thousands and thousands of snow geese.  It was a gray midwinter day and the geese were feeding and calling to each other, lifting up and swirling back down across the vast acreage and shallow marsh pools of the sanctuary, their plump white bodies filling the dark day with light. It was the largest number of birds I had ever seen in once place. The magnitude of their presence, so much aliveness and being able to witness such an enormous expression of the natural order of things, swept over me. It was a thrilling spectacle. The longer I stood there, the more I felt a different awareness growing in me. I began to take in that I was witnessing a massive expression of the natural order of things; a demonstration of how the world goes on all around us being what the world is; not worrying about taxes or politics or fighting about religion.  And that as I stood there, one of the few humans present, that there was a place for me in that world.

Meanwhile the world goes on.                                           Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air , are heading home again.   Mary Oliver

We live with strife. All of us will have experienced some of it in the year closing causing us to feel marginalized and separated. As populations increase everywhere, and resources become more and more politicized, we lose sight of what I felt that day in the sanctuary...we all have a place here. The world works and given the opportunity, it can provide more than enough for everyone. The message of Christmas and all faiths, is that we  all belong--to this world, to each other and most important of all to a magnificent mystery beyond our ability to completely understand but out of its love for us, comforts us through the beauty and order of the world.  

When despair grows in me

and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my childrens' lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water,and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

or grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting for their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry,  The Peace of Wild Things