And so it was, up and down the beach, a rim of light riding in on the swash and slipping back into the night. I was happy then, standing in the surge with lines of moonlight catching on my rubber boots. This is something that needs explaining, how light emerges from darkness, how comfort wells up from sorrow. The earth holds every possibility inside it, and the mystery of transformation, one thing into another. This is the wildest comfort.

~

Night wind shakes the stars in the trees, snow sings off the slope of the hill, wolves hum to their pups, and the depth of the universe throbs like a gong. Somewhere in this same night, choirs raise their voices Joy to the World, shivering the candle-flames in the great cathedrals, and mothers sing the words softly to their children after they turn off the lights. While fields and floods / rocks, hills, and plains / Repeat the sounding joy.

Repeat the sounding joy. The more hollow a heart, the more resonant it can become. I would make of this body, this life, a sounding board, tuned to that sympathetic vibration, which is sympathy, which is feeling together, which is compassion for all the world.

~

We are called to live lives of gratitude, joy, and caring, profoundly moved by the bare fact that we live in the time of the singing of birds.

~

Gladness lifts the natural world out of the merely mundane and makes it wonderful, and reminds us that when we use the sacred stuff of our lives for human purposes, we must do so gratefully and responsibly, with full and caring hearts.

~

This is our work in the world: to pull on rubber boots and stand in this lively, dangerous water, bracing against the slapping waves, one foot on stone, another on sand. While one foot slips and the other sinks, to hop awkwardly to keep from filling our boots. To laugh, to point, and sometimes to let this surging, light-flecked mystery wash into us and knock us to our knees, while all the while we sing songs of celebration through our own three short nights, our voices thin in the darkness.

~

Humans are Earth’s way of knowing itself. With the tongue of a human being, Earth tastes itself. In a human’s search for meaning, it comes to know its own mysteries. In a human’s loving attention, Earth rejoices in its own beauty. It’s one thing to be. It’s quite another to know that and to pronounce it good. This is what a human brings to the world — the ability to take notice, to be grateful and glad, glad for the river swinging by, for the sun warming my shoulders, for the breeze lifting the hairs on a butterfly’s back.