Crepuscular rays at dawn.
Spring in this northwestern corner of Washington State is more often an experience of greening and flowering and birdsong under sublime grey skies, and there is still snow in the hills.
The cattail marsh fills with the song of birds all day long. Soon the Canada Geese flock will return to this cattail marsh, announcing their arrival with loud honking.
Carmel Point
Robinson Jeffers, 1887 – 1962
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
*
Side by side is:
"... There is an old African proverb: "When you pray, move your feet." As a nation, if we care for the Beloved Community, we must move our feet, our hands, our hearts, our resources to build and not to tear down, to reconcile and not to divide, to love and not to hate, to heal and not to kill ..."
(John Lewis, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, published 1998)
