A few minutes ago I presented my Starbucks card.  The barista commented, “one day this is not going to work.”  The piece of gold plastic is old, by charge card standards.  The plastic is split in several places.  One fissure is patched with scotch tape.  I am attached to the card.  I’ve used it to purchase coffee as long as I have been writing to this blog.  I replied to the barista that the day my card fails to function will be the last day of the republic.  We both laughed at the thought.  Laughter seems easier that tears, or of horror.

There is no need for a review of the many crises that we are aware, seeming intractable, persistent, both human and natural.  This is not the first time in history this society has been on edge, close to the fail-point of breaking.  Will there be the decision, the action that “goes too far,” and with cascading effect, accelerates to the break point?  Has “it” happened already?  Perhaps the metaphor is wrong, the image from engineering, that of stress force causing a crack, propagating to catastrophic failure.   How about an image from biology?  Perhaps the inception of a cancer which grows, is incompletely, half-treated, and then, in due time comes “roaring back” to kill the host?  I think of the viral racism that crossed the Atlantic from Africa with the first English slaver ships bound for the rice and cotton plantations in the South in the 17th century. 

We are thrown into the world.  We are born into a family, a particular ethos of a time and place, then  constrained by those circumstances.  We strive to become more human or perhaps we do not.  It is a matter of degree.

Our first duty, it seems to me is to survive.  Survival is a matter of discovering what gives us pleasure, that sustains our will to contribute, to press on.  What is the alternative?  Perhaps the alternative is to lapse into a black cynicism, to play the bitter victim, disappearing into a paroxysm of self-pity. 

For myself, I find pleasure in nurturing growing things, to learn what can be done to dance with nature, to find joy in the forms, the textures, the jewel-like purity of colors…  After a fair amount of trial and error, I have good fortune to enjoy a small lily garden at the back of our yard. 

A few photos serve as a study of an intensely pink lily blossom.  

Can we find pleasure at the end of the world, — something to love?