The families I know who are most defined by living joyously have suffered greatly. Heartbreak that is not permitted to become bitterness can become a sensitivity that reveals how much we long for something whole, and there's not much that is. We can find what is.

We know that in this very plain way the power of what is actually whole is accessible and perfected in weakness and we are driven out of grief and into some form of celebration, which is in itself a finishing, completing place. I'm glad to live there. It is finished. It is restored. It has a vastly different quality than the never-quite-bliss that comes from guardedness or deliberate insulation from the broken things.

These families invite the outsider, the potentially bitter soul, the thing with a wrong appetite to take comfort in the truth and to celebrate what is whole. They feel and break and hurt and celebrate and celebrate and celebrate. And host and host and host.

Passive Voice Existance

Though I hardly have the mind to appreciate it fully, today's technology is astounding. Most of the people I spend time with make a living inventing ways to detect specific aerosols and pollutants of any kind from miles away using just light. How these people are not moved to awe and gratitude to a Creator who is very clearly beyond anything we could ask or imagine is beyond me, and the more I consider that the less naive I feel for it. We are very excited that we can count photons. We overlook that photons were created. It's not hard to say we live for a God who already knows everything, but when we celebrate our "discoveries" (and we should!), perhaps we could do so with a feeling of revelation over our feeling of accomplishment. Whatever we know - photon counts included - is revealed, and only in very small part by expensive lasers and sharp minds (and those, too, to the glory of God). I am surrounded by concepts that prompt enthusiasm... honing that feels effortless today, maybe because I am not the one directing it.

A week ago, I woke up dark and early to the sound of newborn ducklings requesting breakfast. Attracted to the warmth here throughout the winter, their parents must have decided I could be a hospitable nanny. Beats being a cat lady.

I made a bowl of oatmeal, accidentally dropped it into the briny blue (first time for everything), threw on a green Miss Rachel tee, and drove to West River to meet a gaggle of eleven-year-olds on their first field trip to one of my favorite places. After a long day of great questions and tried patience, several of them together asked me to make sure they could come back in the summer.

Sweaty and sunburned, I enjoyed cruising straight into downtown DC traffic-free at 6pm by way of Suitland Parkway to meet visiting friends. I walked the couple to Eastern Market, stopping to hear them identify the plays sculpted on the side of the Foulger Shakespeare Library and enjoy perfumed gardens, brightly painted front doors, and terrible parking jobs.

We nestled into the bar at AA2 tripping over our ital-yano and I had to stop Kieran from sending out my favorite dish. Sampling salad and pasta until Saji snuck us through the speakeasy upstairs, the sun retired behind North Hall, silent before the storm of a summery Saturday flea market.

Walking back past the Capitol, the sky had clouded up, partially veiling the crescent moon, and pigeons circled the well-lit dome gliding and then darting after moths. My friends talked about tilting Greek columns and the subtlety of security detail. They took lean-to pictures in front of fountains and found their hotel a few miles up the road.

I'm not sure anything is as comforting as making someone else comfortable or as enjoyable as being enjoyed.

Earth Day

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. 

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. 

-Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1927)