There also exists an aspect of life that balances all this tooth and claw. It rises up most powerfully, when we come upon the beautiful unexpected. Long bitter winters break open one morning to a softness in the air. Clearing the leaves in the shrubbery reveals a bird nest. A person whom we hardly know, stops and asks about our ailing parent. A gang of rowdy teenagers come upon an elderly woman and one of them stops to hold the door. The winter moon rises in the dark afternoon and washes over us on our drive home from work like a blessing.
After the bitter nights
and the gray, cold days
comes a bright afternoon.
I go into the creek valley
and there are the horses, the black
and the white, lying in the warm
shine on a bed of dry hay.
They lie side by side,
identically posed as a painter
might imagine them:
heads up, ears and eyes
alert. They are beautiful in the light
and in the warmth happy. Such
harmonies are rare. This is
not the way the world
is. It is a possibility
nonetheless deeply seeded
within the world. It is
the way the world is sometimes.
Wendell Berry, from Leavings
To see the world realistically is to honor the natural laws upon which it is built and our existence depends. It means we accept that there is hardness and greed, sorrow and illness and ultimately, our own mortality. It also means we acknowledge it contains deeper mysteries that exist alongside. That awareness is at the core of all our faiths The holiday excitement and bounty is meant to celebrate this truth, to remind us the world and our lives are more than just tooth and claw but most of all, to help us remember what we are really seeking is a world with a lot more sometimes.
