Morning Rain and The Dark Woods
There is a gentle rain falling outside. It is supposed to rain all day. The spring rain will encourage the green shoots to emerge, enlivening the melodious birds. Soon they will raise their families. There is a co-joined harmony between seasonal vegetation, and conscious life forms, humans included, that find a habitat, resources of nourishment and shelter in vegetative life.
Reno stopped by to chat for a few minutes as I write this. We agreed that the warmer weather was to be celebrated. His agenda of the day is to shop for groceries with his wife. We laughed in agreement that shopping while enjoyment of the other can be viewed as “driving one another crazy.” Yes, enjoyment comes in many forms. No question though, companionship beats loneliness, hands down.
Speaking of the grocery business, I read on the front page of the NY Times this morning that internet-centric companies such as Amazon and Walmart–are driving the mid-tier grocers out of business. I was reminded that tyranny can come from the private sector. (Defense of gun ownership rights as a protection against tyrannical government may be a sad mistake.) Tyranny is a unilateral imposition of control to the impoverishment of it’s subjects. Winn Dixie was one of the companies mentioned in the Times article recently forced into bankruptcy. Winn Dixie is a regional grocer in the South. The company provided my first job as a teenager.
To end on a positive note, another Wendell Berry poem written in 1991.
X
Loving you has taught me the infinite
longing of the self to be given away
and the great difficulty of that entire
giving, for in love to give is to receive
and then there is yet more to give;
and others have been born of our giving
to whom the self, greatened by gifts,
must be given, and by that giving
be increased, until, self-burdened,
the self, staggering upward in years,
in fear, hope, love, and sorrow,
imagines, rising like a moon,
a pale moon risen in daylight
over the dark woods, the Self
whose gift we and all others are,
the self that is by definition given.
